Ventriloquist Affair
by JMK758
Summary: Why would a murderer betray his victim?
1. Date Night

This is my 31st NCIS Mystery, the first story of my Fourth Season! 'NCIS' is owned by Belisarius Productions while Dr. Maura Isles hails from 'Rizzoli and Isles', which is owned and produced by Hurdler Productions and by Ostar Productions. The usual legal Disclaimers apply. I only own Rev. Siobhan (O'Mallory) McGee, Apprentice Pathologist Dr. Samantha Sky and original Agents.  
I publish completed stories at a pace of a chapter a week, so I am still in what would be Season 5 of the televised series. I've published several one-shot stories, which were published during Season 4 of the televised series and established that Jennifer Shepherd and Michelle Lee lived into the 2030's, so in 'Transition', a look 'ahead' into 2012, I showed how my characters' futures can be independent of the later fates of their on-screen counterparts.  
You can find all my stories listed in order in my Profile.  
This story takes place in the second week of June, a week after 'The Supervillain Affair'. As I've indicated numerous times, my Affairs are an homage to David McCallum, whose character is presently on a well deserved vacation in Edenborough with Dr. Jordan Hampton.

The Ventriloquist Affair  
by JMK758  
Chapter One  
Date Night

Juliette Spencer rushes into her bedroom for a final check and tries to calm her palpitating heart. She detests what she sees in her large mirror more than she had five minutes ago. Pink! Pink blouse, pink skirt, pink - _agh_! - lipstick. Okay, her bra and panties are pink but Haystings'll _never _see them, she'll slit her throat before she'll be seduced and show them. Pink high heeled slippers - is she out of her mind to agree to this?

'I'm a _blue _girl! Or a green one. At least it doesn't clash my hair; if I weren't blonde I'd _gak_!'

Why the heck had she agreed to this? 'Sure, he asked but I didn't have to say yes. Who lets a blind date suggest a wardrobe? I look like a fuckin' cotton candy!'

**_Bing bong_.**

'Oh God, I'm gonna _die_. Maybe I can tell him I have the plague. Who has a date on a Tuesday?

**_Binnnggg... bong_.**

'Maybe I can tell him I'm dead.'

x

Biting the bullet (she's literally done that), she steps out of the bedroom, feeling like she's walking the last green mile. 'This is the last time I make a date with a keyboard.'

**_Binnnggggg_

"_I'm COMING_!" she calls too loudly.

x

x

...bong**

'Okay, that couldn't be helped. And maybe it won't be too terrible. After all, he was nice or I wouldn't have invited him, and if he's a jerk I can send him packing and if he turns into a mad stalker I can introduce him to my M9. This is what I get for accepting a date on a Tuesday.'

Hand on the lock, 'okay, maybe I shouldn't shoot him until we've at least said hello. So he likes pink, that doesn't mean he's a psycho killer.'

She opens the door before she can fifteenth-guess herself.

x

'Not bad for a first glance,' she decides of the tall blond haired man, about mid-20's, though his black framed glasses make him look like he has two black eyes. The blue suit's okay though. "Hello."

"Hi."

'He looks nervous as I am, and the elevator look isn't creepy. Maybe it'll be okay?' "Robert?" 'Dummy!'

"Yeah." He looks her over again. "Wow, lot of pink."

"Do you like it?" 'You asked,' she thinks, unsure of his tone. Hadn't he, or had she shopped for nothing?

"Yeah." He closes the door. "Look, I know we agreed no talking, but I've got to hear it before I..."

'Agreed?' "It? It what?"

"It. I've got to hear you say it."

'Okay, creepiness scanner on and registering full marks.' But she refuses to get into a logic loop. "Before you what?"

"Kill you."

x

"Okay," she says, "that's very interesting and all but" the pink slipper has a pointed toe and she has lots of practice. His scream is almost girlish and as he goes down she gets behind him and jumps on him, her knees on his shoulders slam him to the floor as he yells in more pain.

'I'll give you something to scream _about_.' She grabs his left arm, locks it backward at full extension and brings it straight up behind him so he's reaching for the ceiling. Her hand bends his wrist just short of snapping the joint and he does scream. "All right, you bastard, you've messed with the wrong woman!"

He's torn between sick moans and screams of agony. "Wha th _fuck_? Why're you doing this?"

'He didn't just say that.' "_Oh_, maybe 'cause you said you were going to kill me."

"Of _course_. That's what you _asked_ me to do."

"Who the hell are you?" She pushes the arm up an inch higher, but it doesn't go that far.

"OWWWW! Bob Hastings and if you're Juliet Spencer you're one _psycho _bitch because for two _months _you've been begging me to come kill you!"

"Screw you, we had a date."

"_You told me_ when you open the door to beat you to death but I had to hear it from your own lips and will you stop _breaking _my fucking _arm_?"

x

Something's very wrong. 'No kidding!' She eases an inch of pressure. "I'm going to let you go but before you can get up I'll have an M9 Baretta leveled on your head and if you _breathe _too hard I'll empty it into your skull. _Believe me_?"

"Y-yes."

She snatches his glasses from his face, gets off him and is across the room before he gets his arm down to the floor. The Baretta comes from a bureau drawer, the holster falls to the floor with the glasses and she has a two handed aim on his skull while he's still turning up to her, grimacing in pain and nausea from his smashed testicles.

"Don't shoot!" He goes several successive shades of white, and if his eyes could open wider the orbs would drop out. Apparently he can see well enough; he certainly sees her weapon.

"Don't move."

"I can prove you sent for me to kill you!"

"From right there."

"I have your e-mail printouts in my back pocket."

She steps up beside him, the weapon over his head and even better aimed now. "I can empty this clip in 1.81 seconds."

"I believe you. I won't move a muscle, I _swear_. Back left pocket."

She lifts the hem of his blue suit jacket, digs in and pulls out several sheets, printed double side and folded in sixths.

"Can I at least have my glasses?"

She glances toward the bureau where they lie on the carpet near her holster. 'How well can he see without them?' "They're safe."

"Thanks."

x

She backs away from him and opens the papers, begins to read the messages purported to be from her. Time and date stamps, she does recall sending notes to the guy who wanted to take her out, but the times... She'd have been on duty many of the times these were sent, but they weren't sent by _her_, they were sent by Juliette Spen**s**er at AOL even though she uses….

And these messages from him– "Spell your name."

"What?"

"Your _name_, idiot." God, I'll put him out of my misery even if he _is_ innocent.'

"H-a-s-t-i-n-g-s."

"Not H-a-**y**-s-t-i-n-g-s? You ever use that screen name?" She's been writing to H-a-y.

"No."

She crosses the room, pushes her 9 into the holster but puts it into the back of her skirt waistband, picks up his glasses, walks back and holds them out to him. "We've got to talk. Sorry I smashed your balls."

xx

Bob no-Y Hastings has been communicating with Juliette s-for-c Spenser for weeks since 'she' first contacted him. He brought these papers to defend himself – great defense they were for cracked nuts – should someone call the police while he was fulfilling Spenser's greatest desire to die. Apparently Spen**s**er didn't care how she left this world, an initial unformed plea to die got negotiated into a fatal beat down. She was supposed to open the door, he was supposed to start smashing her. No words, just a beating that would end only when she did.

If not for his need to be sure she really wanted this, no change of heart or mind, his need to check even if it did break their 'no words' deal...

x

When she brings out her laptop and opens it on the coffee table before her couch, she shows him the messages she'd communicated with Haystings through AphroditeLove, who has tried for weeks to sweet talk her into a date, he goes whiter than when he'd looked, unfocused, up the barrel of her Baretta.

"I didn't. I mean I might've - I would've sent th - if I knew you were looking for... Oh shit, we've gotta call the Police."

"Screw Metro." She gets up, goes into the bedroom and it only takes a short hunt to find her address and phone book. She comes back quickly, he may be innocent but she doesn't trust anyone who'd conspire to kill her.

"Listen," he says, already on his feet and inching to the door, "you don't need me when the police come, you have my–"

Drawing the Baretta from behind is even easier than from the side, she drops the book and her double handed grip is angled low. "You so much as glance at that door and I'll shatter your kneecaps."

At least he sits back down without being told.

Keeping her weapon steady on his chest while paging through the little book isn't easy, but the advantage of a book over electronics is that information is never deleted, simply crossed off when she decides never to see the bastard again. She must scratch out Haystings' e-mail – later.

She backs toward the phone, memorizes the number and holds the Baretta in her right hand while thumb-pushing the numbers and glances at the clock over the television. 2016. 'Hope he didn't turn off his cell for the night.'

/_Very_ Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo,/ his cheerful voice calls into her ear.

"This is Corporal Spencer from the Pentagon." 'Can his eyes get any bigger?' "I need your help."


	2. Revelations

Chapter Two  
Revelations

It's the most surreal evening - might have been the last - of Juliette Spencer's life as she questions the assassin while she waits for Supervisory Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo and his team to drive in from their respective homes. She doesn't keep Robert Hastings under her gun, but the M9 Baretta is very accessible, tucked in the back of her pink - she must change soon - skirt's waistband. She can draw, thumb off the safety and fire in .92 seconds and no matter how much she may believe he's as surprised by this evening as she is, one threatening look and she'll break her record.

"Look, what would make you think I wanted to die?"

"You saying so over and over," he insists again, his tone sharper with each protestation.

"Not me. _Not _me."

"Okay, Juliette Spenser, but you were pretty convincing."

'I'm going to use his nuts for skeet shooting.' "And she gave you my address?"

"Address, picture, everything."

"What did she say? To get you to kill her - me - whatever?"

"Life sucks and you're– she's sucked dry. I tried to talk y– her out of it but the more I tried, the harder she fought. She joined that site she e-mailed me from just to find someone who was willing to off her."

"And she settled on you? You murder a lot of people, Robert?"

"NO! Never. I don't know why she chose me."

"But she di–" Knocks at the door, firm ones, from a fist of someone who's used to getting admitted. She crosses to the door, not altogether convinced it's not another assassin. "Who's there?"

"Special Agent Gibbs, NCIS."

x

She opens the door to a tall, silver haired man whose picture on his ID card in the shield case he displays matches closely enough. "You're one of Anthony's people?" She remembers quite well he prefers 'Tony', but she's distanced him for a reason this man doesn't need to know.

Something about the question seems to surprise him but "Yes, ma'am."

"I think I heard of you from your boss."

"Boss?"

"Very Special Agent DiNozzo." How could he not know which boss? Isn't he a member of Anthony's team?

"Oh, that boss."

"Come in." She points to Hastings seated on the couch across the room. "This is Robert Hastings, the guy who came to kill me."

"I did not! I mean, yeah, I did, but no I didn't."

"Which is it?" the Agent asks more mildly than she expects.

"I came here to kill - no, not kill, Juliette Spenser, not Juliette Spencer."

x

She suspects, seeing his eyes, that Gibbs is thinking this is going to be a long night. Then she remembers something. There had been a Special Agent Gibbs on Very Special Agent Anthony's team, but... "Excuse me, sir." When he turns to her she ventures; "Didn't you retire?"

"Didn't agree with me."

It feels like he's unilaterally dismissed the whole conversation.

'Maybe he couldn't take the sedentary life. Good of Anthony to take him back on, give him some purpose in his declining years. At any rate he seems fairly competent. We'll see.'

"Mind telling me about this from the top?" he asks.

x

They don't get far below the hairline when there's another knock. "Excuse me," Spencer says, returning to the door. "This must be your boss." She opens the door, glad not to be embarrassed on her presumption.

Anthony doesn't look any different than he had almost two years ago, but then he'd picked her up during something at the Pentagon he didn't talk about and she knew better than to ask. He'd been in command of a team of three, a man and two women, but he's the one she dealt with, then and later.

They'd gone out a few times, she'd been okay to see him go - for the life of her she can't remember why - but now she's happy to see him back. "Hi."

"Hello. Sorry I'm late."

"It's okay, you're not late. Your man just got here."

"My man?" She steps aside, letting him see his agent. "Oh, Gibbs." He turns back to her. "About–"

"Right on time, 'boss'." Gibbs says, but does he give the welcome an odd tone? She's not sure. Who can tell with Federal Agents?

"Yes, well... what've we got... Special Agent Gibbs?"

x

It's good to see Anthony, even if it's not how things were when she was a PFC in the Pentagon and he was a newly minted Supervisor and they discussed very little of business on their dates.

Gibbs and Anthony take the interview of Hastings in her kitchen almost from the minute after she finishes their stories. Anthony asks her to stay behind with the two women who arrived moments after him; she recognizes the tall Israeli Mossad officer and the shorter Chinese agent. Anthony goes with the older man to supervise the interview. The old guy seems competent. 'He was probably good in his day. Wonder if he can handle it now.'

x

"Why did you come see Corporal Spencer?" Gibbs asks while DiNozzo stands by near the doorway with a mini tape recorder discretely concealed in his hand. From his position he can see both rooms.

This isn't the ideal way to conduct an investigation but he wants to get a sense of what's going on before continuing more properly at Headquarters.

"I didn't even know _Corporal _Spencer. I didn't know she was a Marine. I thought she worked in a flower shop."

"You thought you were e-mailing a florist?"

"I was e-mailing someone who wanted to die."

"And she wanted you to kill her?"

"Yes! That's what we thought. I thought."

"How'd it start?"

"I... well, I go on some Social Networks, most of them are pretty anonymous, you know? Well, out of the blue, this girl e-mails me through ' ', tells me she saw my profile and liked it. We chatted, nothing serious. She sent me her picture and e-mail address, JulietteSpenser at AOL; we came off the site."

He stops talking, Gibbs will wait. It's 2130 but no one's going anywhere.

"Anyway, she starts telling me how horrible her life is, how she wants to end it all. I try to tell her it wasn't so bad, that there are good things in life. But she was really fixed on how much life sucks."

xx

"At first he seemed nice," Juliette says to the two women seated on chairs facing her. She's seated quite uncomfortably upon her couch but with the women at ten and two, this isn't a social chat; the agents are penning her in is more like it. "He seemed to understand me, to know what to say. I wasn't really looking for a boyfriend, it was just someone to chat with. Not chat, we didn't chat in real time, we e-mailed. Slower, but more convenient."

"How did you meet Robert Hastings, the Robert Hastings you thought you were communicating with?"

"I was on ." She sees something in the Asian woman's eyes. "What, do you know it?"

"No. That is, some of my friends..."

"AphroditeLove?" the taller woman cuts in.

"_Well_, I don't get a lot of opportunity to _date!_" She fights it back, they're here to help.

"How often did you correspond?" the taller brunette doesn't ask; pushes is more like it.

"At first once every few days, then more and more frequently until I'd find a note in my box every evening when I'd get home. After a while I got to really looking forward to them."

"You did not tell him what you do at the Pentagon?"

"I never tell anyone what I do. I can't discuss my life. A lot of secrets pass through my Division, most of them no one below Lieutenant ever sees but I know my share of sensitive information."

"What are your duties?"

"I'm an Analyst. I listen in on recorded intercepted transmissions from the mid-east, anything ECHELON flags as using key words. ECHELON monitors the Internet, anything it alerts on goes to human Analysts like myself. If I find something that seems credible, I alert my Lieutenant and pass it on.

"Well anyway, he e-mailed me on Aphrodite, but though he said he liked my profile it wasn't another of a thousand offers for spice. I thought I'd take a chance."

xx

"No matter what I said," Hastings insists to the men, "she was obsessed with her own death. Then gradually she started wanting me to kill her."

"Why you?" Gibbs asks.

"She seemed to have a lot of death fantasies. Sex death. Sex where death is the climax. Know anyone like that?"

Thoughts of Abby flash into his mind, but she's never led him to think that sex for her in any way equates to her fascination with death nor that she'd seek death as a form of climax. He knows there are some that do, but he's relieved that list doesn't extend to his favorite scientist.

"What did she tell you?"

"She had these wild fantasies, like being screwed with a sword, being a sacrificial maiden deflowered on an altar and then skewered with the sword, interrogation by the Spanish Inquisition or–"

"I get the picture." Now how to be rid of it? The apartment door chimes a 'bing bong'; he ignores it. David and Palmer can handle any caller.

"So she talked you into it?" DiNozzo prompts.

"Well," he shifts in his chair. "Not ... exactly."

Gibbs hates this kind of answer; things always get worse after they crop up. "Then what, exactly?"

"Well, you see, she, um, said she didn't care how she died or what, um, happened to her body afterward."

"What was going to happen to her body afterward?"

"Well, you see, she was into sex and death, you know? We finally made a deal: I'd beat her senseless, rape her and then kill her."

x

"You agreed to this deal?" DiNozzo doesn't sound like he can believe he's hearing this.

"It was, uh, my idea."

"Yours." Gibbs wishes he had a good, simple al Qaeda terrorist to interrogate. Those he can understand.

"Well, you see, I was hedging about killing her. She didn't care how much it hurt, even if she was beaten to death, so long as she died. So she ...agreed ... that I could rape her."

Gibbs leans forward, unsure when he's heard anything so outrageous.

"But I wasn't going to kill her! I swear!"

"What were you going to do?"

"Well, I was, that is..."

"What?"

"I was going to knock her around a bit, rape her like we agreed, then... well, then I'd hit her a few more times ... until she passed out, then ... leave."

"Leave?"

"Then when she woke up and wrote, said I didn't kill her, I'd tell her she seemed dead when I left. If she sicced the police on me I'd show them all her e-mails, tell them I didn't want to go through with her plan for me to kill her."

x

DiNozzo comes around in front of Hastings. "Let me get this straight. You were going to beat her. Rape her. Beat her to 'death' and then betray her?"

"It was _her _idea! I didn't go to _her_, _she _came to _me_!"

"Yet you came here this evening," Gibbs presses, not wanting to have to 'remind' him. Hastings hangs his head. "What went wrong?"

"She insisted over and over that we not talk, I was just to come in and start hitting," he says to his shirt buttons. Gibbs and DiNozzo's eyes meet.

"Makes sense," DiNozzo admits. "If they talk then no beatings, rape or murder."

x

Tim McGee steps into the open portal. "Sorry I'm late, boss." His voice causes Hastings to look up at him and McGee stops. "Bob?"

Hastings' face goes white with horror, and then his expression crumples. "Oh _shit_." He drops his head into his hands, his words muffled. "Oh shit, oh _shit_! It _can't _be."

"Boss, what's going on?" McGee asks.

Gibbs has never known anyone so devastated to meet McGee. "You know this guy, McGee?" He doesn't consider it the most pointless question of the month, just the way of getting the shortest and most direct answer.

"This is Bob Hastings, he's a Minister at our Church, Shav's and mine; Saint Mary the Virgin."


	3. Protection

Chapter Three  
Protection

"Oh _yeah_!" DiNozzo exults, enjoying Hastings' trapped expression, "I thought you looked familiar."

Gibbs also recalls where he'd seen this face, it was when the team had visited the office of Reverends George Donaldson and the then Siobhan O'Mallory while investigating the murder of Marine Lieutenant Christina Dumas. There's a photo portrait of Dumas, Hastings as well as Melanie Velez, whom he's met several times since, on the office wall near the door. That first encounter with the Priests was the beginning of a very strange though fateful year, one he never wants to repeat. "You're a Minister?"

"No. Yes."

"Which is it?" Can he administer a wake-up call to a civilian? He's never done it but if ever he were tempted...

"Please, let me _explain_." Gibbs gives him his 'this had better be good' expression. "In the Episcopal Church _every _baptized Christian is called to service as a Minister. I'm a _Eucharistic _Minister."

Gibbs holds up his hand. The Roman Church also has Lay people who distribute the Eucharist and administer the Wine and he'll learn more later, depending on how relevant it is to the conspiracy to murder Juliette Spencer.

x

"McGee, get Spencer's computer, backups, everything she ever used to talk to the other Hastings."

"Other Hastings?" He comes to light just in time. "I'll find out about it."

"Then you and David take _him _home and collect his stuff."

"My _stuff_?"

The young man's distress only makes him want the stuff more. 'Wonder what McGee's wife will think of one of her people plotting assault, rape and murder, even if he _was _invited.'

"It'll be a really good idea," DiNozzo says, "for you to turn over everything Special Agent McGee asks you for."

"If I don't?"

Gibbs decides that didn't even sound like an attempt at bravado. "We put you in Protective Custody as a material witness while we execute a Search Warrant for everything _I _think we need."

"It's just that, well, there's, that's my personal computer. I've got a lot..."

"All we care about is what has to do with this case. DiNozzo, tell Spencer to pack, she's going into Protective Custody too. Take her to a Safe House. You two have a lot of catching up to do."

DiNozzo looks appropriately dismayed but it's Hastings who's the most vocal about the arrangements.

"Wait! We're both being arrested? But I didn't do anything."

If this is the sign of the thinking in the Church today, he feels sorry for it. "You stop to think yet that someone went to a lot of trouble to get you to kill Corporal Spencer and bring yourself down for it? You've just pissed him off."

xxx

Juliette Spencer closes the car door firmly. In the back seat is a sufficient change of clothes and other necessities to cover a several day Protective Custody delay - it had better not last too long - but she'd insisted upon changing out of her 'cotton candy concoction' before she'd leave, declaring she never wanted to see another piece of pink clothing in her life.

"You lied to me."

"I did not," Tony counters, vastly surprised. He'd wondered how they'd spend their first minutes together after their last date so long ago but this isn't it.

"You told me you were in charge. I looked like a fool in front of the man who really _is _in charge."

"I was in charge. Back then. The boss had retired, or resigned, depending upon who you spoke to. But then he came back."

"Didn't he trust you?"

Tony turns to her. "Ow, baby," he says in his best Austin Powers. "Major ow." But then he drops the pose. "No, he trusted me. But things changed. I guess, when you come down to it, retirement didn't suit him."

"And how did that sit with you? Going back to Number Two?"

"Number One, actually. I'm good – and I don't remember you being so bitchy."

This halts her. "You're right. I'm sorry. I'm not used to being set up to be murdered."

He punches the preprogrammed setting for the nearest Safe House into the GPS unit. "Happens to me all the time."

xxx

Wednesday oh seven hundred comes unconscionably early after a late night that, as Gibbs overhears the complaints of his team as he approaches the bullpen, ended for the last of them at about two. Fortified by the extra-strong, extra large coffee, he enters just as DiNozzo wants to know from McGee "What did the Missus think of your busting one of her people?"

"What did Doctor Benoit think?"

"Didn't tell her," DiNozzo says, surprised by the redirection.

"Well, Tony, neither did I."

"You keeping secrets, McGee?" Gibbs asks as he sits down at his desk and sees the unwelcome stack of morning reports. The final stages of the Uranium theft and planned sale at the Hotel Meritz are still coming in and they're already hard at work on this new case.

"No, boss. But since Robert Hastings is a witness, not charged with anything, there's nothing to tell."

"What've you got from his computer?"

"Noth - no, nothing yet, boss. I–"

"Well, come on, McGee, you've been in for almost eight minutes."

McGee grins and turns to his computer while Gibbs turns on DiNozzo, who doesn't have as much excuse. "What about Spencer? Where is she?"

"I took her to Theta House and called in Montesano to mind her."

"I am surprised you did not take the job yourself," Ziva says.

"That would be unprofessional, Zee-váh."

"As I recall, Theta house is relatively secluded."

x

Gibbs notes DiNozzo doesn't rise to the bait and he's quite happy for this line to die. He also doesn't care for the recent DOD designation of Safe Houses or Apartments leased by Agencies by Greek lettering, it makes the places sound too much like College Frat Houses - or in this case Sororities; but the DOD ultimately foots the bill so 'NCIS-Theta' it is. Theta's an apartment over on Ellicott Street NW west of River Road, not much bigger than his basement and could probably be improved by a boat.

"Where's Hastings?"

"Kappa."

This interests him. If Theta could be improved by a boat, Kappa could be improved by sailing a boat through it. "Who'd he piss off?"

"Conquin. She was the point agent who picked him up from his place from Palmer after McGee and Ziva collected his 'stuff'. Seems he got into an argument with her over having to stay in protective custody. She was driving him to Delta but changed her mind."

"Guy seems to have a talent for meeting women and pissing them off."

"Good thing you didn't assign Ziva."

"Maybe he should have, Tony," the woman counters. "He would have made it to Delta, albeit with a bloody nose."

Tony remembers the last time Ziva had someone in custody and hit him. It resulted in a debacle whose worst aspect could not be resolved; a dead agent. Stanley Hobart's tree, dedicated in the grove outside, is a pine. "What is this guy, his own worst enemy?" he asks, turning to the one man who knows him.

"I can't say," Tim evades.

"He's a Minister in your church, McPew."

Tim turns to Tony, not quite sure he's heard this one right. "Mc_Pew_?"

"It's early and I'm tired. Either that or your deodorant is wearing off."

"You're going to be staying late," Gibbs predicts, growing tired of the banter. "What'd you get off Spencer?" Seeing the light in his eyes, he instantly regrets the phrase. Fortunately DiNozzo's smart enough to reach for the plasma screen's remote control. Apparently he's already shunted the files through his computer.

x

"Corporal Juliette Spencer," DiNozzo announces with a click of the remote that brings up the uniformed blonde woman's official portrait taken at her promotion together with the cover summary of her military history, "enlisted six years ago and excelled in languages. She speaks Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Pashto and Farsi as well as the traditional ones; French, Spanish and Italian. She was quickly scooped up by Counter-Intelligence. Basically she monitors those channels that ECHELON, which monitors the Internet, flags when keywords crop up. She takes the transmissions apart, flags those that sound like they need further investigation. Once in a while she even gets to suggest new keywords."

"Critical?"

"Not quite. She's good but so are many others. Ziva could do her job,"

"Thank you, Tony." There's little gratitude carried in her tone.

"Just saying if she missed a day of work, the walls wouldn't come tumbling down, even though they do have a spare."

"What has she heard lately?"

"Not a lot she considers significant, but Analysts don't always get let in on the big picture."

x

"McGee, Hastings."

He gets up, snatches the remote control from Tony's hand and brings up the file and image already active on _his _computer. "Robert Hastings, 24, born June 16, lives at 646 L Street NW."

"Not far from Saint Mary the Virgin," Ziva observes. The Church is on New York Avenue Northwest, itself a fairly short diagonal street extending from Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th St NW northeastward to K Street and 9th St NW.

"No. Went to Potomac and Majored in Economics, B average. Nothing really significant in his history."

"What's not in his history?"

"Boss?"

"He was set up to rape and murder someone he thought was a Florist, McGee. What is it about him that'd make his 'Puppet Master' think he'd do it?"

Tim notices Tony perk up at the title of a series of horror movies but the man wisely holds his tongue. "I don't really know him, boss. I mean I see him, he'll serve with Father Donaldson or with Shav, he and Melanie Velez almost alternate but I take no particular notice. We might exchange a word or two occasionally at 'coffee hour' after the Services but I don't _know_ know him."

"What's your take on him?"

"I don't have one. I never expected to walk in on last night and find him accused of conspiracy to assist in suicide."

"Assist in Suicide?" Michelle bites at his right, yanking his surprised attention to her outrage. He can't see her for the partition between them but he hardly has to. "Suicide? Try conspiracy to assault, _rape _and _murder _an innocent woman." He rises from his chair to look over his monitor well enough to see her turn back to her monitor. "Suicide, my ass."

x

Into the miasma of silence that smothers the bullpen Gibbs rises and crosses to her desk. "Something you want to get off your chest, Palmer?"

She looks up, but the contriteness in her almond eyes is flavored with lingering anger. "No, sir. I'm really sorry, it's just that–" She looks down. "No, sir."

Faced with several choices, each more distasteful than the last, he settles for returning to his desk. He'll let Abby or Ziva - no, Abby - take this, woman-to-woman, later.

Then he stops, at least in his musings as he sits back down.

There is no Abby Sciuto.

xx

Ruby Rae looks from the Gas Chromatascope that beeped to the Mass Spectrometer whose buzz just about drowned it out to the AIFIS system that beeped for her attention at virtually the same instant and wishes, despite the vast array of absolutely fantastic technology the Edenvale Sheriff's Department could never afford, that she was back in Edenvale.

'Couldn't she warn me during the day we had together _why _she works 16 hour days and couldn't I have had sense enough to ask? Twelve field teams and a Pathology department plus a Questioned Document to test the age of plus–. No wonder Abby went home!'

She's only been here for three days and feels about to tear her short red hair out of her scalp when the Chromatascope beeps at her again and she knows that if she doesn't go to it the AIFIS computer program will finish remind her that it wants her attention and someone will come in just at the instant when she yells at everything to shut _up_.

The rapid beeps from the sliding door declare her hope has run out, frantically chasing after her luck and patience. She turns, it's Doctor Isles Assistant, Jimmy Palmer. _Doctor _Jimmy Palmer, excuse much. She recalls the last time she worked here - for three hours - that she'd met him and developed an instant crush on him; that is until he got married to a woman with a gun. "Yes?"

"Doctor Isles asked me to find out if you have an analysis of that kidney sample."

x

She opens her mouth and '_beep_'. "I just did. I mean I do." She goes to the computer on the freestanding workstation, calls a labeled graph onto the screen and prays he'll give her a few moments before he asks

"What is it?"

"_Give _me a moment, please. You're married and you don't know a woman needs time to build into it?" As she hoped, he blushes, rather prettily in fact, and while he evidently tries to dispel the image she's planted in his masculine skull, she has those few seconds to interpret this collection of chemicals and their concentrations. "Methanol, ethylene glycol…. Anti-Freeze."

"That's what she said it would be."

"I was pretty sure too. You don't get kidney crystals from that many things. Arsenic will do it, but not a lot more."

There's a moment of uncomfortable silence, when Ruby can practically feel his gaze from her red hair down to her toes but can barely manage to lift her own eyes to check, then: "I should be getting back," he says.

"Yeah," she says quickly.

"Right."

"Bye." But he's a few feet from the door and she doesn't want to seem to be letting him go but she can think of only one thing. Last time she came for just a few hours he was working under a Doctor Mallard, whom she's never met but has heard a lot about from Abby. "How's Doctor Isles?"

"Pretty good. Really pret – er, that is, smart."

She smiles, knowing what he bit off. "What's she like?"

He thinks for a moment. "Well, she says she did her Residency in Panic, Specialized in Terror and now she's a Doctor of Doom."

She can't help but laugh. "She sounds like a real trip."

"She's like Doctor Mallard never left."


	4. Unsub

Chapter Four  
Unsub

"What does this guy do?" Gibbs asks McGee, whom he'd assigned the background check on their prime suspect. "He's not a full time Priest like Father Donaldson or your wife. What's his story?"

"He's a Baggage Handler at Reagan."

Tony remembers his own undercover stint on that job, the less said about which the better. He had managed to make a quick $10 tip on the job, but he'd also simultaneously made the unintroduced acquaintance of Trent Kort.

"Load anything funny lately?"

"Not according to what I've been able to pull up," McGee says. "No red flags, no investigations, no missing bag complaints that can be traced back directly to his job performance, no unexpected or unexplained absences from the job. He spends as much as he makes, apparently as fast as he makes it which is probably why he still lives at home with his mother and father."

"I heard from Ziva," DiNozzo puts in, "that when she and Probie went there to collect his stuff it was like he died and went to electronic heaven."

"It wasn't like that, Tony," McGee protests.

"I did not say that, McGee." She also sounds like she doesn't want to be brought into this."

"I heard you were salivating, McGeekenstein."

Even Gibbs pauses at that one, though only for an instant. "What's his story?"

"He is building his own music studio in his basement," Ziva says.

"Way you tell it," DiNozzo puts in, "if he cranked that baby up we'd hear it here."

"Perhaps not literally."

xxx

Jimmy returns through the pneumatic steel and glass doors one level down in the Autopsy Suite and greets the woman with "Anti freeze."

"Ethylene glycol. No surprise." Maura Isles says. "Anti-freeze has been a popular choice for slow murder for years. I recall one particular case from July 7, 1989, when Patricia Starlings' three month old son Roger had trouble breathing and was vomiting uncontrollably. She took him to the Emergency Room at Cardinal Givens Children's Hospital where a toxicologist diagnosed Roger's symptoms as ethylene glycol poisoning."

"Really?" He's astounded she could just have this bit of trivia on the tip of her tongue. He'd been right in what he'd told Ruby Rae; it's like Ducky never left.

"Yes. The Authorities got suspicious and his physician got Roger placed in a Foster Home where his parents could only visit him. After one of those visits Roger became critically ill and died."

"Oh, no." Why can't a Pathology story ever have a happy ending?

"However, while the Investigators were trying to sort this out, one of the other Starling children also took ill and also died. The poison was traced back to the bottle Mrs. Starling used and she was charged with first-degree murder. She was sentenced to life in prison in January 1991."

"Well, at least she got what she deserved."

"No, she didn't. Subsequent testing showed there was no etholene glycol in the bottle or the milk, but that the children had a genetic disorder known as methylmalonic aciduria."

"I studied that."

"I would hope so. The symptoms of MA actually mimic EG deaths but have absolutely nothing to do with it. Propionate showed up in the older Gas Chromatographic testing as ethylene glycol. The equipment back then wasn't as sophisticated as we have now.

"Now methylmalonic aciduria, as you know, is a recessive metabolic disorder that's normally diagnosed in the early neonatal period but _wasn't_. The children died of this genetic disorder, there was no ethylene glycol at all; the tests were a false positive based on traces of propionate. Subsequent tests with newer equipment cleared Starling of the charges and she was released in 1992."

"Good."

"All of which goes to show that we can't simply go by what appears to be an answer, we have to dig deep until we prove that it is the answer."

"Yes, Doctor. But wait a moment; you 'recall' this case? You couldn't have been even 10 years old when that happened."

"Bless you. Now I know why you have half the women in NCIS fawning over you."

"Ab - ub - they _do_?" He fixes his glasses which had almost come off in his near spasmodic jump. "I mean they don't. I mean I do? I mean, do they?"

She'll only answer with a smile.

x

"I'd say our unsub was dosing him for at least a month," she says, switching back to SSA Rosa Arnell's case.

"I'm sorry? Unsub?"

"Don't you use unsubs here in NCIS?"

"Well, I would... if I knew what they are."

"Unknown subject."

"Oh. No. We use perp."

"Why?"

"I–" This halts him. "I'm not sure. I suppose Special Agent Gibbs doesn't go in for fancy words."

"He has quite an impact on everyone."

"He's like a force of nature."

She grins. "Say it."

"Say what?"

"What you're thinking. He's like a typhoon." She's already experienced being deluged by him.

"Nooooo. More like an earthquake."

"Oh? How so?"

"No one stands against him."

She grins again, looks past his left shoulder. "He's standing behind you."

x

Jimmy whirls so swiftly he nearly slips in his protective foot coverings and has to clutch the silver table, but he's seen they're alone. "Don't _do _that."

She has to work to hold in a laugh, but it _was _unfair. "I'm sorry. But I've noticed that about him. He tends to lurk. Not around me, however," she says, stepping over to the bank of coolers and reaching for the door to 101. "I don't think he likes me."

Jimmy knows what Gibbs doesn't like, that except for hair several shades lighter brown than Kate Todd's black, the women would've been identical - if Todd weren't dead. "He doesn't hate you."

"No," she halts, turns from the unopened door. "He hates what I remind him of. 'If I'd only been more alert.' 'If I'd only watched for more danger when I thought everyone was safe.' 'If I'd only had her stay down until everything was secure.'"

"Doctor Mallard says that 'If I'd only' is the direction sign on the journey to madness."

"He's right."

Seeing the haunted look in Isles' eyes - how much does she know? - Jimmy never wants her to know that Doctor Mallard had been talking about him.

xxx

Robert Hastings stabs the button on the television remote and CBS News goes off.

"You break it, you bought it," SA Tom Berger points out from the reclining chair angled out from the corner to face both the studio apartment's window and the only door.

"I'll leave you a dollar." He gets out of his chair, picks up and rifles through the Washington Post for two seconds, then throws it at the table top. "It's not _fair_."

"Life isn't fair."

"Oh, brilliant observation, Mr. Philosopher."

"Kid, when you're traipsed around as long as I have, you get to know that's the first lesson in life."

"But I didn't _do _anything. I had a freaking date with a girl. Suddenly I'm locked up in this stinkin' hell hole."

Berger looks around the studio apartment: single bed in the corner; easy chair recliner for him he plans to use thoroughly over the next 7 hours; eighteen inch TV with Cable; kitchenette with well stocked fridge and cupboards; bathroom with working fixtures - always a plus in a Safe Station. "I beg your pard'n, it's a very nice hell hole." Given the choice between shifts here or pounding the pavement, he'll put his feet up any day.

"But there's no Internet."

"No, I'll give you that. But since there's no computer and WiFi is screened off, it's no loss anyway."

"Shit. And I don't even have my smart phone."

Berger's surprised he has to remind this guy that "You're suppos' to be hiding. Think anyone's going to let you sign onto Facebook or Twitter and announce your position? You might not care, but you're not gettin' me killed."

"But it's not _fair_. _I'm _not the one who set that stupid bitch up."

"Now be nice. No name calling. 'Sides, I thought you were suppose' to be a man of God."

"I _am_."

"Then how'd you wind up in this mess?"

"I answered an email from a woman," he says miserably, sitting back down.

"That'll get'cha every time."

"How was I supposed to know it'd really turn out to be the date from hell?"

"Look, kid, half the dates with women turn out to be dates from hell. You gotta know the trick."

"Which is?"

"Pay for dinner, then run like hell."

xxx

Gibbs, DiNozzo and David emerge from his yellow/black Hemi in the Pentagon's vast parking facility. On the way - ten minutes out in fact - he'd had DiNozzo call ahead to get Clearance for their visit to the Counter-Intelligence Division. He knew that wouldn't be enough time, his intent was to limit the number of people who knew they were coming, the better to catch a potential suspect off guard.

Federal badges and a 'we're on the same side' attitude eventually get them to the office of Captain Sven Olavson, second level Chief of the Department. Gibbs concludes the initial pleasantries with "Someone tried to kill your Corporal Juliette Spencer last evening."

x

The reaction he's rewarded with to this 'sledgehammer between the eyes' announcement is just enough of a combined surprise and concern to convince him to take the chance and continue. "Do you have any idea why someone might want to harm her?"

This is usually a tricky part, for he won't tell Olavson - yet - how the proposed murder was negotiated. This part of the interview is normally the gauging phase, where he tests a subject's responses rather than the information he might elicit.

"No. No, I don't. Is she hurt?"

"What was she working on?" They already have her words and the information from her duty files. "Anything sensitive?"

"Everything this department handles is sensitive, Agent Gibbs. Everything means lives and battles lost or won." If Olavson is put out at Gibbs' ignoring his question, he doesn't show it. Then again, he's obviously used to dealing with military minds, where even casual conversation can encroach on 'Need to Know' constraints. "Corporal Spencer's work was, to the best of my knowledge, no more or less significant than any of her fellows'. If she's made any recent, important discovery, I haven't been informed of it."

x

Both Spencer and Hastings agree that this conspiracy started weeks ago, which prompts two questions: Did the information come out weeks ago and its significance get missed? Possible but unlikely. Or is there a new threat so severe that someone wants to disrupt this department so it'll be missed?

That's even less likely. While that had been the plan in the USS Eisenhower uranium theft, this is more than one ship or a confined group of people.

Altogether, there are few ways to pin a conspiracy down, and previous experiences aren't going to apply in these cases.

"What have you got in the works?"

"Agent Gibbs, I'm sure you can appreciate the sensitive nature of all our operations." Okay, Gibbs acknowledges; 'need-to-know' works both ways. "Truth is, I don't have the authority to read you into a lot of them."

"Who does?"

"Captain Stender. He's at Marine Barracks."

All the way back to the Navy Yard. If he'd but known... "Meantime, we'd like to talk to Corporal Spencer's co-workers."

"I'll have someone escort you."

xxx

The Analyst Center is eight cubicles set in the middle of the room, four three-quarter enclosed workstations to a side, six square feet of space for each man and woman. Though the stations face one another, each person is trapped in the illusion of solitude by the high partitions and must stand to converse with his or her fellows. Headphones complete the isolation; each person compartmentalized into a world of foreign languages and intrigue.

Gibbs considers this arrangement satisfactory. So long as they're so isolated, Rule 1 is still in force. The cubicle at the near right is vacant. He points DiNozzo and David to the two far end interpreters while he takes the one at the near left. With fortune, they can pull the three into far corners and might even begin a second set of interviews of the inmost Analysts before the remaining men and women are aware they're here.

x

Gibbs has selected a man who, by his pale coloring, may not get out into the world very often. The uniforms of the seven are from all five branches of the Service. Spencer is a Marine, the two who have only one representative are Air Force and Coast Guard. Gibbs will consult later with Abby Boren of CGIS to see what she may know.

His target Marine looks to be about twenty five and needs to get away from his cubicle more often if he wants to see a good forty.

"Corporal Gautam," he says, reading the man's ID card clipped to his uniform pocket, "how well do you know Corporal Spencer?"

"Why? She in some kind of trouble?"

Usually when someone asks that question it's with a measure of concern, not pleased anticipation.

"Should she be in trouble?"

"She has a big mouth. She doesn't belong in a sensitive position like this."

"How so?"

"She talks to Harper about her duties." His gaze shifts to the far right corner and the female Chief Petty Officer Gibbs is hardly surprised that DiNozzo has chosen. Ziva's interviewing an Army Sergeant in the far left corner.

"Shouldn't Analysts consult with their peers, Corporal?"

"Just because it's encouraged doesn't mean it's a good idea... sir. And she's too open."

"About what?"

"She's too open, she engages everyone. I've warned her."

x

Gibbs decides to get DiNozzo's input as soon as possible, and the man had better have picked up on this. "She discuss the details of what she hears with you, Corporal?"

"That's only proper."

"She learn anything particularly sensitive?" The question elicits nothing. "Say within the past two months?"

"Only bit thing I know that panned out was movement, a unit massing three kilometers north of Pol-e Khomri. Our boys hit a munitions bunker with some Smart missiles. Killed eighteen, including a mid-level Taliban leader."

He'd watched that strike on MTAC during a 'chat' with Jennifer Shepherd about the Wetzel / Presit / Hudson and so on case. Artillery and couple thousand pounds of bombs had made an impressive display on MTAC's big screen.

"Which of you uncovered the information?"

Gautam gives him a disgusted look. "What does it matter?" Gibbs leaves him to answer the question himself. Eventually he admits that "Boniberger did. Either way, we're the unsung heroes. Credit went to some Colonel somewhere because he ordered the strike. Army Idiots wouldn't know where to hit if we didn't tell them."

xx

CPO Karen Harper thinks carefully, it seems to DiNozzo, about every answer before she gives it. He's not sure if this is from a career of withholding Classified information or from a distrust of this civilian, himself, who comes up to her asking for said information with only the assurance that Olavson cleared him to receive it. Why couldn't the good Captain have sent someone along with the directive to talk?

Anyway, talking to the attractive officer is taking a long time.

"When did you meet the Corporal?"

Consider. Search the memory. "When we were assigned here."

x

How would she answer a question like 'where does the sun set?'. She'd probably say '…in the …west' but would it be because it's a secret or because she'd given all due consideration to the possibility that it might set in the south?

"Do you two talk much?"

Pause. Consider. "Define 'much'."

"Do you talk?

Pause. Consider. "We do."

"When?" He's immediately sorry when the question makes her pause - and consider.

"When we speak to each other."

"Okay, listen Chief Harper, because I don't know if you're playing or serious and right now, I don't give a damn. Do you know why? Because someone just tried to kill a Marine Corporal - Juliette Spencer if you have any uncertainty - and you're working your way up the ladder from information source to Chief Person of Interest. Now what do you know about this?" Silence. Just an occasional blink. Is she running through every conversation she ever had with Spencer? The image of Tom Wilson from the 'Back to the Future' movies flashes into his head. "Hello? Anybody home?"

"I know nothing about this."

'Maybe I should have used my knuckles.' "All right, Chief, you can go back to your work. I'll call on you if I need you." 'Which, considering my continuing streak of bad luck, will be soon.'

xx

When Gibbs calls a halt to this endeavor, all seven men and women have been interviewed with a discouraging lack of success. No one's lying and no one knows a thing.

DiNozzo's surprised when Gibbs, rather than leading the way back to Captain Stender's office, heads toward the nearest exit "Boss?"

"We're wasting our time here."

"How so?" Gibbs turns back and DiNozzo feels a particularly staggering head slap in his future. He also doesn't care for the anticipatory gleam in Ziva's eyes.

"If al Qaeda had something going that they wanted to keep silent they'd have to take out _eight _people who don't even leave the building together, and they wouldn't use such an elaborate plot for a couple of weeks."


	5. Paint the Background

Chapter Five  
Paint the Background

"This, ladies and gentleman," DiNozzo elaborates to his captive audience of 'subordinates' in the bullpen, Gibbs being upstairs bringing the Director up to date, "is Juliette Spenser with an 's' so far as Robert no 'y' Hastings seems to have believed." The image on the plasma screen is of the real Spencer posed in front of a Florist's shop. It must have been quite a scorching day, she's dressed in an off-the-shoulders white midriff blouse and blue jean shorts that'd get her arrested anywhere outside Hazzard County, and she might even be at risk there too.

"It was pulled off her Facebook page, but I had to do quite a bit of digging, the shot's over two years old. I can't wait to hear the particulars about this juicy shot."

"I can imagine," Michelle says.

None of the three 'junior Agents' want to be part of this Campfire, chairs pulled to the center of the bullpen, but they have little choice. Gibbs had ordered both subjects in this quite unusual crime brought in from their respective Safe Houses and until they arrive the case, which had fizzled out for clues at the Pentagon, isn't moving fast.

"Obviously the hacker, or the Puppet Master as our fearless leader has dubbed him–"

"He would not have done so had he anticipated your affection for the monikin," Ziva bites.

"Moniker."

"We don't want to get him started on blow up dolls or anything similar," McGee cautions her.

"Never mind." Ziva nearly shudders at the thought while Michelle, close to her desk rather than within the throng, does so literally. "Anyway, the Puppet Master who has sent Hastings against Spencer had been plotting this for quite some time."

"Hastings says he saw the profile with this picture when he was trolling ' '," Tim says, hoping to bring the recap to a quick close so they can proceed, "but she didn't use RomancingTheOne, she used ."

"Is it common for Singles websites to cross-post to their competitors?" Ziva asks.

"At monthly membership of $15 per?" Tim asks and sees the look in Ziva's eyes. "I checked yesterday and no, I'm not a member."

"I would never deply that you were, Tim."

"Imply, but thank you, Zee."

"AphroditeLove," DiNozzo muses. "Sounds like something from Palmer's cult."

"Aphrodite is the Goddess of Love in _Greek _culture," Michelle bites, sounding quite offended, "so while there might be _some_ ethereal connection there just as well might not be." She leans forward, her intense tone bordering on anger.

"And Wicca is a recognized Religion, _not _a _cult_, so recognized in 1975 by the Department of Defense." Tim and Ziva exchange uncomfortable glances at her kindling fire. "In fact, since 2001 the revised edition of the Air Force Personnel Data System includes Druidism, Shamanism, _Wicca_ in all its forms _including_ Dianic Wicca, Gardnerian Wicca, Pagan Wicca, Seax Wicca - _and not only_ _that_, the Military Chaplain's Handbook acknowledges Wicca _and _outlines procedures for interacting with Wiccan and Pagan soldiers - _and in 2007 the Pentacle was approved for use on military headstones_!"

x

Tim and Ziva are both impressed by her passion, uncharacteristic as it is, but unfortunately Tony leans back in his chair, seemingly unfazed.

"So you say. Me, I have reservations about any group that has women priests in charge and make sacrifices on altars made up of nude women."

Tim, closer to Ziva than Tony but still between the combatants, cuts in as Michelle rises, menace in every taut muscle. "On behalf of the Episcopal Church, which ordains women as Deacons, Priests and Bishops, I should resent that."

"I most _certainly_ do," Michelle declares, taking a step closer. "For _starters_, I do _not _practice _Skyclad _and those who do, do so for very valid and practical reasons as expressions of Faith and to perform rites which we hold _sacred_. None of us in Rising Star Coven use a Skyclad woman as an altar. So far as I know, _you _are the only one here who makes sacrifices to nude women!"

x

DiNozzo stands and applauds, albeit a measure too slowly to be complimentary. "Touché... or should I say touchy?"

"Why shouldn't I be?" she cuts and Tim and Ziva look on uncomfortably at the standing pair on either side of them, feeling like they're sitting in a minefield in between two artillery emplacements firing back and forth over their heads. "I have to practice tolerance with the public, smile at their inanities - I _don't _have to take it from co-workers who are _supposed _to be college educated _before _applying for Appointment."

Now Tony's evidently impressed. "Boy, touchy is right. I never knew just how little it took to get under your thin skin."

She takes a hard step closer. "You _touch _my skin and _I'll kick you in the balls_!"

x

DiNozzo, quite surprised, unfortunately expresses this in a rather astounded grin and Michelle advances, fists clenched and measuring off with her gait the kickoff.

"_Michelle_!" McGee's on his feet, blocks her path, his height nearly a foot above hers and his girth an effective wall. His appalled exclamation halts her and she looks up to him as Ziva steps in front of Tony.

For an instant Tim's not sure if she's only changed targets but she turns with a snap and stalks out of the bullpen's rear exit.

x

"Wow," is all DiNozzo can say when the broiling rage dissipates.

"You are very lucky Tim stopped her," Ziva says.

"You're telling me. I was only kidding."

"You seem well skilled lately on getting on women's bad sides."

"Like every woman in NCIS," he grants, referring to his painful ostracism.

"Like _Shav_," Tim bites, turning to him.

"This is nothing like your wife, Tim," Ziva counters

"How so?" What DiNozzo had put Shav through had been horrible, completely outside the limits of friendship but, sadly, not out of character for him. DiNozzo's nosiness has had disastrous effects too many times in the past, but that one had hit too close to home.

Ziva looks to DiNozzo. "Because Mother McGee was not going to execute you."

"But what's going on with her?" He hardly has to elaborate. As the Palmers' relationship continues to fragment with every roadblock in their marriage, Michelle's control of her temper wears thinner and thinner. Neither Palmer discusses their situation, except perhaps with Siobhan McGee or Milton Gives, but the fragmenting relationship and increasing stress grow more jagged by the day.

Tony moves to follow her. "I've gotta fix this."

"Better let me do it," Tim counters, taking a step in front of him.

"Why?" Tony demands.

"Because if you go after her we'll be dedicating a new tree."

xxx

There are certain places each of them habitually go when things overwhelm. He'll go to the roof unless it's a Tuesday, when it will be the fourth floor east. Today's Wednesday. Jimmy can usually be found walking the banks of the Anacostia, Ziva goes to the gym or the basement shooting range, Gibbs goes to his basement and boat and Michelle can usually be tracked either to Autopsy - which a look through the glass door without even getting off the elevator proved his first guess wrong - or else she goes to the gym.

"Oh! Tim, I..." she halts suddenly, the Gym's Ladies' Locker Room door closing behind her.

He's slightly surprised, for in just the few minutes head start she'd had she's already changed into workout shorts and shirt. "That was some scene up there."

He says nothing more. He'll let her fill in the silence. It's a particularly effective technique Shav's taught him to value.

"I guess I'm lucky Special Agent Gibbs wasn't there."

Not quite what he had in mind. He supposes that sometimes the direct way is the best one. "Let's talk about it."

"Let's not." She tries to step around him; he backs up and blocks her path again, this time not to prevent violence. "Tim, I don't want to."

"Just answer me one question."

She tries to step around his other side, a large step back and aside puts him in the same position. She sighs. "What?"

"_Were_ you going to kick Tony in the balls?"

"No." He holds his gaze and she slumps. "Yes."

"Does that seem like a particularly good idea?"

x

Long pause. Evasive? "No." She meets his eyes. "But it would have been satisfying."

"Well, I have to give you that." Now that he has a smile from her he can ask "So what's going on?"

Her shoulders follow her spirit into the slump. "Oh, it's Jimmy. I thought I could handle it but it's…. If this keeps up I'm going to be the one on Doctor Gyves' couch."

Tim recalls the incident of a few weeks ago, when she'd appealed to him to contact Shav and the women had discussed some cryptic arrangement which neither has divulged to him. He knows he could've asked either of them, but if neither of them revealed anything there's probably nothing they want him to know.

"How bad is it?"

She shakes her head, and he's not sure if she wants to tell him. "The nightmares are getting worse. Ninety percent of them are about death – _my _death. But a few weeks ago, the day we called out – the day he called us out – he dreamed he beat me."

"_Beat _you?" This is a distressing turn. Jimmy's the most non-violent person he knows - when he's awake.

"Beat the _hell _out of me. Actually the dream started with him finding me beaten to a pulp and his not remembering doing it, but he says I screamed at him to move out, and he was scared that I–"

She clamps her hand over her mouth to hold back a sob. She looks about to burst into tears and he gives her time to fight it back.

x

When she finally lowers her hand, she seems little better; her voice is hushed but she can't look up at him. "I don't know what to do anymore. I'm so frustrated. I never know when we go to bed if I'm going to be able to sleep through or be woken up by screaming. A couple of times I've moved out to the couch but couldn't sleep there, not when he told me he found me beaten up on the couch. I was afraid if he woke up and came to find me and I was on the couch…."

He reaches out carefully, puts his arms around the smaller woman.

It's like hugging a statue.

xxx

"About time you two came back," is how Gibbs greets them when they return to the bullpen through the rear entrance. Tim glances to Michelle, who'd changed out of her unused gym clothes, but the look is just enough to convey to her that he'll keep her confidence. Again.

"Sorry," he says. "What've you got?"

What he gets is a surprised look.

"What I've got, _boss_," Gibbs says broadly, "is a guy claiming he was invited to a murder and an Analyst who hasn't made a significant discovery."

He's also got a Senior Field Agent who is very willing to let a pretty subject think he's in charge and now a computer expert who's not very far behind. Maybe he's gone too far in making them expand their responsibilities.

x

"Chatter has been minimal for some time, 'boss'," Ziva announces, unable to refrain from adding a smiling dig of her own for she's looking at McGee. "The collective discoveries of the eight Analysts have not been earth shuddering."

"Shattering," Tony corrects.

"I said what I said. You cannot shatter the Earth by any known force, but you can make it shudder."

"You're both going to shudder if you don't give me something useful in the next two minutes."

x

"I did find the email exchanges that Spencer with a 'c' and Hastings without a 'y' told us about," McGee says, "and they're pretty much consistent with what they told us they received and sent. But the incoming messages, well, they're pretty much what we've been told. Tentative 'getting-to-know-you' from Haystings and 'please kill me' from Spen**s**er but..."

"Starting today I'm fining anyone who stops on a 'but' $5."

"But I found a lot of distinctive errors on Spenser with an esses' messages. There are consistent spelling mistakes, such as 'ino' instead of 'ion' and 'ti' rather than 'it', indicating both a lack of attention, which she spells 'a-t-t-e-n-t-i-N-o', to proofreading and correction, or as she would put it 'c-o-r-r-e-c-t-i-N-o', as well as a distinctive habitual mistake. L-o-g-e rather than l-o-d-g-e as in lodge a complaint, 'i-g-n' rather than 'i-n-g'. I don't think it's dyslexia, because most words are normally spelled correctly, but the distinctive errors at the ends of words are consistent. She does, however, spell words like C-o-n-s-i-s-t-**a**-n-t, e-x-i-s-t-**a**-n-c-e, t-e-s-t-**a**-m-o-n-y, words that sound like they'd have an 'a' in them are spelled like that."

"What about Haystings with the y?"

"Not him. I'm sure we're looking for two different perps."

"Good work, McGee."

"But boss, there's something else you should know that I found on Hastings' computer."

"What?"

"Something I'm really I worried about."

"I won't ask again, McGee."

"Videos."

"What sort of videos?"

"Well, boss," he glances left and right at Ziva and Michelle.

"Spit it out, McGee."

"We are grown women, Tim," Ziva says. "I dare say we have encountered the seamier side of male libidos often enough not to be shocked by anything you could reveal."

"I don't know, Tim," Michelle demurs. "I'm still pretty virginal."

"That's not what I hear," Tony counters, seemingly unable to let things alone. "I heard from the Autopsy Gremlin that he had to eat most of his meals standing up the other week."

"I'm sure I don't know _what _you're talking about."

"_Now_ McGee!" Gibbs doesn't care what his married - or his single - agents do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. He wants to know what Hastings is doing on his computer and how it affects this case.

"Well, boss, it's generally pretty violent. Violent... male and, er, female... type stuff."

"Sexual assault?" Ziva asks, surprised at how her former lover is still so prudish, particularly after some of the filth he's been forced to wade through on some suspects' computers and on-line accounts. She suspects that after reviewing Gabriel Leher's laptop, he's seen more rapes than he can stand and wouldn't want to see another. But again, this is no stranger. Hastings is a nominal friend, or at least a clergyman in his own Church.

"No, just plain assaults." This pulls all their attentions. "Videos of women being beaten; some short clips from movies, other longer specialty videos."

"This is probably one time we don't even need Ducky for a Psychological Autopsy of this guy," DiNozzo says.

"Still wish I had him. What has Metro got on him?" Gibbs asks Michelle.

"No criminal record, no indication of trouble."

"McGee, this Ministry thingy."

x

"He's attended Saint Mary the Virgin all his life, at least from as much as I've heard. I've never had occasion to care to check.

"According to the Diocese of Washington, he was Licensed as a Eucharistic Minister by Bishop Adam Metcalf two years ago, so his license has another year to run."

"What was it he said earlier? Everyone in your Religion is a Minister?"

"I wouldn't say Religion; denomination yes, but not Rel–"

"McGee."

"Still not exactly that. By virtue of being baptized, every Episcopalian is called upon to be _a _Minister - that is to spread the Gospel and bring people to a deeper relationship with God, plus do everything he or she can do to ... Well, to do what priests would do for others in the community. Priests are Ordained to leadership roles and empowered to confer the Sacraments, but we're to do everything else along with them."

"Even you, McPulpit?"

"Yes, Tony, even me. Every one of us. But we do have members of the Laity," if he talks consistently enough DiNozzo won't be able to break in, "who are trained and licensed to serve at a Church in various capacities. Eucharistic Ministers are not Ordained and there are two Classes: Ministers and Visitors like Christina Dumas had been; but you have to be one before you can apply to add on the other." The late Marine Lieutenant had held both positions at Saint Mary the Virgin. She'd been murdered almost a year ago, which case had actually started him on the path that had led to marriage with Shav.

"Deacons, Priests and Bishops are Ordained. Deacons and Priests have to go through years of training in Seminaries before they're Ordained but everyone has to go to Annual training."

"Including your wife?"

"Including Shav, yes, Tony. She could _teach _the Course but yes."

"What if she doesn't take it?"

"There's no such question. They have to."

x

"All right," Gibbs says, wanting to keep things in focus. "They're in for life, what about those others like Hastings and Velez?"

"Their licenses are valid for three years and they may not Serve without them. They're issued by the Diocesan Bishop by request of the Rector or Priest-in-Charge, and they must also take the courses annually in order to stay Certified."

"What kind of Courses? What's involved?"

"There are two kinds. There's retraining in the duties they perform and then there's SHE/CAP. That course everyone connected with Ministry - and _yes _that includes Shav - must take every two to three years maximum."

"What's SHE/CAP?"

"It stands for 'Sexual Harassment Education' and 'Child Abuse Prevention'."

"You mean they have to _train _–"

"_DiNozzo_."

"I meant in its prevention, boss."

"What if one of them doesn't pass?" Gibbs presses McGee. He doesn't like even the NCIS required annual Green / Yellow / Red Light nonsense, but in today's social climate - what a stupid phrase - there's no getting around any of it.

"Because I do not believe he is going to pass," Ziva predicts.

"If up for renewal, his license wouldn't be. If still in effect, it might be suspended or terminated."

"You ever hear of any trouble with him?"

"If there were trouble, I'd never hear of it."


	6. Execution by Proxy

Chapter Six  
Execution by Proxy

Gibbs is about to call his agent out on this but changes his mind. He's had experiences with how closed-mouthed either Reverends George Donaldson or Siobhan O'Mallory McGee – particularly the latter – can be.

However, in the region between the Religious and Secular worlds, removal from Office or being Relieved of Duty carries its own special brand of the eyes of a layman, a suspicion or accusation is an automatic guilty verdict and sentence - and if sentence isn't warp sped and merciless, public outcry is long and aggravatingly loud. Therefore there'd be intense reluctance to let a problem go public.

He's known enough occasions in his Military and Investigative careers when someone involved in minor wrongdoing would have their resignation declared 'accepted' with no more word on the subject, and certainly no defense considered, tolerated or permitted.

The 'Public' can be merciless. He remembers the incident with Ensign Mark Cabrera of the USS New York, who was declared guilty before NCIS even arrived at the crime scene and loud cries had risen for his execution before the Investigation had begun.

He suspects this may well be the result of this incident in Hastings' case, whether the guy's charged by anyone or not.

He's known enough occasions of automatic sentencing _instead _of accusation or investigation, and despite what videos the man may download, that's no evidence of guilt in this case. He's not going to allow Hastings to be summarily executed _instead _of being investigated.

Nevertheless, there must be an Investigation, and in due time it's sure to reach the priests of his parish.

x

"What else is in that computer?"

"I found the email exchanges, right where Hastings said they'd be, spelling errors and all. I matched them to what was in the exchange history. He copy / pasted all their chats into one long Word document, but only the text portions, not the hidden Header information I need to trace these back to the sender. That'll take a little longer, because not even the emails have enough data. I'll need a warrant for the Yahoo account." He doesn't need to look at her to know that Michelle is already opening the template needed to prepare the Affidavit.

"Bet Spenser with an 's' didn't like that when she found out," DiNozzo concludes.

"You got that. I already read where he let it slip and she went ballistic. She says she'd been deleting all their exchanges about her 'arranged suicide' and he should have been doing the same thing."

"Naturally she'd be deleting this," Tony says.

"No," Gibbs counters, "she kept every word."

"It is not every day," Ziva agrees, "that you can trick someone into murdering a United States Marine and get him to believe she asked for it."

"Execution by proxy," Tony concludes.

"Dupe," Michelle corrects.

"She was getting hearts and roses," Tony says, "while he was getting graves and lilies."

"Good reason for the killer to go underground when he realizes he's been tricked," Tim points out.

"Even if he doesn't realize it," Gibbs says.

x

"Metro can't easily link killer to victim," Tony says. "No motive, they don't know each other. If Hastings hadn't stopped to check, we'd have a dead Marine we can't link him to."

"Who was Spencer writing to, the hearts and roses guy?"

"I know where you're going, boss, but the guy's already been there. The account traces back to Venezuela."

"Venezuela?" Gibbs is already working out how hard it'll be to get information from that country. Ziva's still contending with the paperwork for the insurance for her last 'close encounter' with a Venezuelan national, and that just involved a limo's bumper.

"It's almost certain the perp isn't there _or _at any Embassy," McGee stresses to head off anyone's speculation, "but using the national account code makes it almost as complicated."

"Why wouldn't Spencer know she was communicating with - or through - Venezuela?" Gibbs asks. For an Analyst that should have been a no-brainer.

"Because, Boss, she was communicating through the AphroditeLove website. sent the messages to the Venezuelan address, but no one knows the originating IP addresses. AL don't care either where their customers are so long as the bills are paid in US Dollars and the Credit Card's not declined."

x

"Could this Puppet Master have gotten into Hastings' computer, think that he's a good choice for beating and murdering a woman and target him for this set-up?"

"If so, I might be able to find something. I can contact the ISPs and get their grep logs for Hastings' and Spencer's IP addresses. They'll show what locations were accessed. The perp would've routed through a proxy server to avoid direct contact but the proxy will have kept a record of where the IP–"

"Don't tell us about it. Find it."

x

The phone on DiNozzo's desk rings and the conversation's suitably short. "Juliette Spencer's being escorted up." Almost as soon as he finishes speaking the elevator bell sounds and a few moments later Marine Corporal Spencer enters the bullpen under escort of a male agent. Her hair is pulled back in strict military fashion and her crisp uniform is well enough pressed for the creases to draw the blood of the unwary.

It's as far from the shaken vision in pink they'd seen last night as anyone can get, so it screams of overcompensation.

"Corporal Juliette Spencer reporting as ordered."

Gibbs really doesn't want her to salute and is glad when she doesn't. Technically he'd outrank her if he weren't retired from the Corps but that was a long time ago and he can see even without Ducky's input that she's compensating for a lot of trauma. It's not easy to open your home and inchoate trust to a blind date who comes intending to kill you.

"At ease, Corporal," he says, waving the escort back to his duties. "We're civilians here."

"Yes, sir. It's just that–"

"You don't like dating a murderer."

"_It wasn't a date_!" But the effect is accomplished, he's gotten under her guard and she visibly relaxes. Once the armor of posture and formality collapses, it's notoriously hard to get it back. "Sir, I'm not even sure what it was. The whole affair seems unreal."

She's still holding on to formality as a shield.

"Let's start with this," Gibbs says, pointing to the picture of her that's still frozen upon the plasma screen. When she turns, her re-stiffening is obvious. She looks back to him.

"Where did you get that?"

"Your web page," he tells her.

"Facebook," DiNozzo snatches up the thread, "but I had to go back about two years."

"I'd forgotten it. My boyfriend–" she turns back to Gibbs, "my _then_ boyfriend took it. That's what made that idiot think I was a florist?"

"That and the letters the one who set you both up wrote." He comes out from behind his desk, impolite to remain seated while she's standing and he doesn't want to miss any of the nuances of her reactions to this conversation by her turning her back on him.

x

"Boss," DiNozzo calls as he sets the phone back into its cradle, "Robert Hastings has just arrived."

The timing is suitably fast and otherwise terrible. "Have him brought down to Interrogation. David, you and Palmer work on him." He ignores the surprised look Palmer throws him.

x

"Tim", Michelle says, coming out to stop before his desk, "could you print up some of that garbage from–?" He hands her a manila folder. "Should've known."

He spares a telling glance past her and says very softly "Rule 29."

"Anticipate every possibility'," she returns as covertly.

"He doesn't like being kept waiting."

"I wouldn't have minded." She opens the folder, closes it immediately as she feels the color drain from her face. He'd selected the worst of the collection, and now she sees he's sorry. Far too late. "Fine. Thanks."

He leans forward, pitches his voice even lower, she can barely hear him. "You okay with this?"

She half grateful for his concern but "Is it going to matter?"

x

Gibbs, who can overhear the quietest of conversations, knows Palmer's feeling about the man is quite prejudicial; when he reviews the tape it will be with as much attention on Palmer as on Hastings. He's spoken to the woman several times about her temper, let's see how well she controls it in the presence of a would-be, pseudo-contracted rapist/traitor.

"Tell us about those letters," he directs to Spencer when the two Agents leave the bullpen.

Spencer's expression shouts that she doesn't want to get into personal matters, but there's nothing more personal than murder. "He emailed me a few weeks ago, said he'd seen my profile on . I should have shot him down right then, but the picture he sent, well, I just – I was a little intrigued. I had no reason to shoot him down and he didn't look awful. I was in a mood, and he didn't come on like any of the ding-dongs I'd met in real life so I figured 'why not?' I'd give him a try."

Gibbs won't go into the fact yet that Hastings says _she_ contacted him - on RomancingTheOne. It had been Spen**s**er who had contacted him.

"He seemed nice in the letters so I gave him a chance."

"How long did you communicate?"

"With Hastings, apparently never. And I really don't want to think of what he was getting from 'Spen-**s**er' except I can't avoid it. With '_Hay_-stings', about three or four weeks. He seemed normal."

"What did he say?"

"The usual 'get to know you' crap; what's your favorite color, favorite food, what do you do? I should have changed my mind about meeting him when he asked me to wear plenty of pink when I'd told him my favorite is blue. God, I hate that color, that whole girl/pink thing. My mom used to dress me in pink when I was in carriage and stroller; by the time I could say 'no' I made my position very clear."

She sees how interested Gibbs is in this recollection. "I told him I was an Airline Hostess, no one who doesn't know me knows my job. In retrospect, maybe I should've told the bastard I was dealing with that I was a Marine. He'd probably have run like a rabbit."

x

They'd covered last evening how circumspect she is, today he wants to be very sure. Only he and DiNozzo are open about working for NCIS, the other agents all have cover stories they tell strangers and acquaintances. "You never told him you're a Marine?" They'd checked out the Pentagon and the Analysts who monitor and translate intercepted communications through the Middle East because it'd been the logical first move, but he'd expected her life was somewhere on the Internet, because that's how they'd been contacted; she through AphroditeLove, Hastings through RomancingTheOne. Gibbs can well appreciate why they'd both be targeted over the Internet; those damned sites, and all their like, are too damned invasive. He suspects any competent hacker could get anyone's life history off these things.

"Never," she tells him. "It's too dangerous, even if Captain Stender were to allow us to tell what we do I wouldn't do it. My cover's an Airline Stewardess - okay Flight Attendant, I'm archaic - but since they can be laid over anywhere on the planet I don't have to explain to anyone why I can't make appointments."

"Better than a Greeting Card Salesman," Tony says. This does get her to turn back.

"Tony, if you're going to compare me to Don Adams in _any _way, you're about to blow your final chance to get back in my good graces."

"Actually," Tim says, sounding like he's attempting to defuse a bomb without seeing the wires, "you're not the only one who keeps a secure job a secret."

"Really."

"True. McAuthor tries to convince people he's a writer - about Federal Agents with the Navy of all things. That is, until they read one of his books. Sorry, boss," he only allows a miniscule cringe under the hard glare.

"Is there anywhere that you tell anyone you're a Marine?"

"Absolutely nowhere, sir. In fact, my Facebook profile picture is me at a ticket counter at Reagan."

"And the one of you that led to Hastings being told you're a Florist?"

She glances back at the damning image. Her pose before the huge window is too sexy, the off-the-shoulders midriff blouse makes use of too few of the remaining buttons and the ends of her hip pockets peek out under the hems of her cut off denim shorts.

x

"I thought I deleted that."

"Nothing on the Internet's ever deleted," McGee tells her.

"That picture," Gibbs observes, "is what lured Hastings to Juliette Spen**s**er, Florist."

"Whoever is doing this had to dig pretty deep to find that shot. I don't change IDs, I've been a Flight Attendant since the day Al Gore invented the Internet."

As a joke it bombs worse than Hiroshima, but at least it takes some of the tension with it.

Some.

"Do you know what Hastings does for a living?" Gibbs presses.

"No."

"Baggage Handler at Reagan."

"Shit. But I'm not at Reagan, even if my cover identity is."

He doesn't intend for her to know more.

"This is bad, isn't it?"

Gibbs won't mince words. "Yeah, this is bad."

x

Gibbs regards the Marine who pulls herself to greater Attention and has to select his next move. If the woman isn't being targeted because of her duties as an Analyst at the Pentagon, if the 'Puppet Master' who set Robert Hastings to murder her thinks she's either an Airline Attendant at the same airport Hastings is employed at, or actually is a Florist, then the Investigation has just taken so sharp a left turn that any of them could suffer figurative whiplash.

Could it center around the airport? His gut says 'no'; that whatever the key is, this goes far beyond real Baggage Handlers and fanciful Stewardesses.


	7. Inquisition

Chapter Seven  
Inquisition

When Special Agent Tom Berger drops Robert Hastings in Interrogation One he offers a jaunty wave to Ziva and Michelle and tells them he can be found in Fingerprint Analysis when they need him. Ziva suspects his interest lies less with Fingerprints than it does with SA Susan Olivetti, but she has too much on her mind to spend any more time upon even this thought.

As Berger departs, Michelle, on her left, looks up to her. "Which of us is going to do this?"

Ziva recalls Michelle hadn't reacted well to the 'rape deal' or to the photos Tim found on the man's computer. She looks down to her and smiles. Hastings wouldn't even be a challenge, but she's interested in seeing how the younger agent performs.

"I'll toss you for it," Palmer offers.

"I would not want to injure you."

"I meant – oh, never mind, forget it."

She grips the file folder more tightly in her left hand. Ziva suspects she wants to keep her right fist free.

She would suggest to her to lead with her left if she were confident the woman would not act on the advice. She had not been pleased with what Tim had found either but it is clear the smaller woman has been affected much more severely. As Palmer stalks out the door, she hopes she has not made a mistake.

x

Michelle closes the door, takes two steps and forces herself to stop. This isn't right. This man, regardless of what's been found in his private documents, is neither a suspect nor a prime mover in this case. In his own way he's as much a victim as Spencer is, and if he'd been idiotic enough as to carry through on the plan that had been laid out for him, they would now be searching for him - or already have him - on charges of rape and murder.

At the most, they have him here now for not being quite as stupid as Special Agent Gibbs' unknown 'Puppet Master' believed him to be.

By protocol, Berger will first brief Gibbs on everything learned over the hours he was in the Safe House before pursuing his own interests. She wishes he'd stayed to brief the one who's doing the freeping interview.

But now she has to get her aggravation under control. She'd pictured herself going into this room, asking the guy if he'd intended to become a Priest, dumping the pictures from his drive - why'd they have to be in color? - and telling him to forget it.

But she's the one who has to forget it.

x

She takes a deep breath, deeper, deeper than she can stand and holds it, endures the pain along with the strain until she can endure no more, then very slowly she lets it out until pain and strain are gone, replaced by comforting relief.

After that pain, any sensation counts as relief but her chest feels more relaxed and she tries to spread that relief through the rest of her body. She closes her eyes, centers herself, concentrates on her calming exercise. She knows she should go in, but she'll be useless as she is.

When she opens her eyes, she extends her hand toward the door, points to a spot three feet closer and slightly over her own head. She fixes the point in space in her mind, it's a real point of Ley energy - there's actually a Ley line that runs almost right through Autopsy that she can tap when she needs it - and as she slowly lowers her pointing finger downward to the left she pictures the gleaming white line she draws.

It's real. She can feel it in a way she's never been able to successfully convey even to Jimmy. She's never been able to express the objective reality of the eldritch power to anyone outside Rising Star Coven. She actually never tries to explain to anyone but Jimmy, but at this moment she needs it.

She'd prefer to do this with her athame - and not in a basement corridor - but since her sanctified dagger is locked away with her other paraphernalia in the bedroom cabinet that doubles as her Altar, she'll make do with what she has: next to nothing.

Bringing her directing finger upward and right and silently speaking her prayer to the Goddess, only her lips moving, she slowly inscribes the pentagram in the air from floor to slightly taller than herself. With her spirit vision, that faculty that's neither imagination nor sight, she can see the shining white five pointed star being completed as she connects the final line at the top.

An un-Sighted person would, as the term implies, see nothing; but as the final link is complete she sees the star shine brighter in her spirit vision and can feel its force shining upon her skin.

She slowly steps forward and through it, feels the power play along her skin, tingle like an electric charge, rub away her chaos, restore her peace and recharge her power. Through it now, she lets the star disintegrate back into the cosmos from whence she'd formed it.

She opens the door.

x

Robert Hastings sits, uncuffed, elbows on the table, his face looking like it'd pour through the gap between his palms. If ever there were a more pathetic figure she's never met him.

"Mr. Hastings, I'm Special Agent Michelle Palmer. We met last evening."

"My life is over," he says, his jaw barely slipping between the junction of his hands. "You may as well shoot me now."

"A tempting offer, but I'm not allowed to shoot you until I get a signed D9560."

As she'd hoped, this does bring him up. "What?"

"Bureaucracy; the Government's full of it. I can shoot you with a D9560, but an Execution requires a D4628 in triplicate, signed by the Director and that'll take about a half hour."

"Are you _serious_?"

"Of course not." She sits down, the folder before her. "But your problem definitely is, and you'll have to level with me a hundred percent if we're going to do anything about it." She reverses the folder, opens it and fans the damning images across the tabletop.

"_Shit_. You weren't supposed to look at those!"

"Believe me, I wish I hadn't had to. But our computer expert found them," knowing their connection, she won't mention Tim's name; if he doesn't get it then too bad, "and their pretty damning after what you told Special Agents Gibbs and DiNozzo last night."

"I'm not like that," he insists, shoves the pictures away until they nearly fall off the table.

She leaves them there. "What are you like?"

"I'm innocent. I don't _do _this!"

"Then what do you do?"

"I just collect, you know? I like to look, _but I don't do it_."

"You didn't answer my question."

"What?"

x

She gathers the pictures and moves them to the right corner, out of the way but still there. "Mr. Hastings, I don't know if you do this or not, and frankly I don't care. It's not going to change my opinion of you." 'You're a misogynistic slug.' "But it _looks _like you like beating up women and my Supervisor thinks that someone may know or have found out about this and decided you'd make a good Stooge."

"_Stooge_?"

"Don't press it." She knows the word's semi-archaic, she's trying her best not to rap him in the mouth but it's a near thing. "When did you first make contact with the fictitious florist Spenser with an 's'?" Tim has the exact date and time of the first email, she wants to get a sense of him. There are various ways of knowing if someone's sincere, she has many of the mundane ones plus some that aren't taught in FLETC.

Maybe some day, if and when she gains influence in NCIS, Mystic Awareness will be in the curriculum.

But for now she relaxes her facial muscles, her arms and hands. She'll give him nothing of what she's thinking or feeling, give Ziva nothing, give the camera nothing, give Gibbs nothing.

x

"A couple of weeks ago."

She prepares herself for a testimony barren of specifics. "And?"

"She seemed okay at first, but her sex talk, her fantasies were dark. She wrote about being sacrificed, skewered on an altar, but not in the heart. She wanted the sword up her–"

"I get the picture," she says quickly. She has her own altar, though it's far too small for laying upon, but she doesn't want the image and damn it now it's too late.

Some Wiccans practice Skyclad, far fewer participate in Sex Magic but despite Special Agent DiNozzo's distorted ideas even he wouldn't think that low. "What did you say?"

"Well, nothing at first. She wrote about how life sucked, how she wanted out of it, how she'd rather be dead."

"Why didn't you break it off then?"

"I thought I could help her. I _am _a Minister, after all." He stops, she hadn't been able to keep the thought off her face. Mother McGee, Father Donaldson, they're Ministers. He's no more an Ordained Priest than an Auxiliary Police Officer is a LEO.

She fights to get better control, works hard on her Gibbs face.

x

There's heavy irony in the Witch subjecting the Churchman to the Inquisition, and it feels that's the way it should have been in the past. It would certainly have rendered history a lot less bloody - and a lot fairer.

"I thought I could show her what there is in life, the beauty of it, how God loves her and has plans for her life, how she'd lose out on so much if she took away her life rather than let God work through her to improve her life."

"Did it work?"

"No."

He sounds too dejected, and the only thoughts she has are 'That's 'cause you're not a Minister, you're a volunteer Assistant.' She focuses harder on Gibbs. Does she have to do it until her hair turns his grey? "So what did you do?"

"I kept trying, but the more I tried the more determined she got that she wanted to die."

She brings her left hand down to her lap. "Did you call for help? For her? Guidance for you? Talk to Mother McGee? To Father Donaldson?" 'To a _real _priest?' She squeezes her nails into her palm.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I thought I could handle it."

She forces her hand to unclench. She'll draw blood and have to see Jimmy - what's bad about that? - if she fights harder to keep from saying what's in her heart. "Do you have any training as a Therapist?" He handles baggage at Reagan Airport, but maybe?

He looks down. "No."

"Did you suggest she seek therapy?"

He seems very interested in the tabletop. "No."

"Why not?"

"I thought I could help her." He finally meets her eyes. "I thought I could help her find God."

x

She finds she can't fault him for that, if true. Not outright. He works with Siobhan McGee and Mother McGee counsels - quite well, in fact, considering her work with Jimmy and herself - but the Priest has received special and often renewed training, he hasn't. But are his motives as pure as he would paint them?

"When she insisted that she wanted to die, who suggested the method?"

He becomes quite attentive to the mirror behind her, to her left shoulder, to the smudge on the table top. "Well, she wanted to die, she wanted me to beat her to death."

"And when she told you, what did you say?"

That mark on the table seems so interesting to him. "I don't know."

Again her nails torture her palm as he stares at that smudge. She _will _go to Jimmy after this. "You had a woman you never met asking you to murder her." She leaves it there. He doesn't pick it up. "Mister Hastings?" Her tone makes him meet her eyes. "She wanted you to murder her. What did you _say_?"

His eyes fall from hers and he looks back down again and stares so long that she resolves to come back later and scrub that spot away. "I didn't..."

"Didn't what?" She gives him a twenty count, then fans out the pictures and moves them into his eye line. "I think a woman wanting you to beat her made you very interested." He tries to look aside, there are enough pictures for her to cover the table with them and she does so. "Your chance to turn fantasy into reality."

"No."

"She begged for it, agreed to be raped if you'd just beat her to death."

"NO! I wasn't going to do it!"

"Oh, that's right. You were going to beat her senseless, _rape _her, and then beat her again, then leave her beaten and unconscious. _Then _when she emailed you and complained, you were going to give her a bullshit 'you were dead when I left you' story."

"No."

"That's what you told Special Agents Gibbs and DiNozzo. _Two _beatings plus a rape and a betrayal."

"No."

"Then why did you say it?"

"I didn't."

She points over her shoulder to the ceiling mounted camera to her left. "Don't you know by now that we record all interviews?"

"But I'm not like that."

x

Back to the beginning again? No, thank you. Time for Plan X. She waves her hands over the pictures. "Must have been a real cock-thrill, having a woman beg to help fulfill your fantasies. Is that why you didn't tell anyone?"

"NO! You have to understand. I have never done this in my life."

"Making this the perfect opportunity. And you had all her begging on paper, just in case you got into trouble."

He turns away in the seat, face hidden in his hands. "Noooo. How can I convince you? How can I make you believe I'm not like that?"

'You can't,' she thinks, but bites it back. She's _not _going to hurt herself again. This time she will certainly draw blood - hers. "You can try the _truth_."

If he's being set up, it's an effective ploy. If he's really behind it, and there is no 'Puppet Master', it's a plot so convoluted it borders on the ridiculous. Still, he'd be easier to stomach if he weren't such a pervert.

x

He pulls his hands down from his face, swivels back to her. "Okay, I'll trust you."

"That'd be a very good idea."

"Okay. The truth is I ... have these urges, you know?"

"No, Mr. Hastings, I don't know." 'I've never wanted to be beaten up, and I have never wanted to hurt Jimmy.'

'_Liar_!' her conscience yells and shows her the image of her husband staked out naked on their bed, she with a leather switch in her hand and his bottom streaked with dozens of red lines.

'_Leave me alone_!' she screams at her conscience.

x

"Okay, it's like this," Hastings continues with barely a break, "I like to fantasize - _not _do. I have a lot of stress at work, and I'm not in a position to do anything about it."

'Thank the Goddess for that.' "And?" Unions being what they are, she doesn't believe this story either, but she'll listen. Special Agent Gibbs doesn't allow slapping suspects - more the pity.

"Well, sometimes there's only one solution that'll allow me to keep my job."

If this is his only solution to stress, maybe she should reconsider Plan X. Then again, she can handle him even without backup. "What about at your Church?"

The question seems to rock him. "What about my Church?"

"Well, as a Eucharistic Minister you have a lot of restrictions on your behavior. And that's not an anonymous position like Baggage Handler is; you work closely side by side with all kinds of women… girls. What do you do when tensions become strong and you have to maintain such high standards?"

He's meeting her eyes less and less often, and for briefer and briefer moments.

"You have to take these courses every year or two to keep your License. Sexual Harassment. Sexual Abuse. You're held to a Priest's standards and you're not even a Priest. You can't even date without tongues wagging, and any time they wag you have to prove the talk is nothing." She'd learned a lot from her talks with Mother McGee, never imagined she'd need to use the knowledge against anyone.

"I can date."

"Yes, that's true. But if it's one of your fellow parishioners you have to be _so _careful. Don't dare lose control. Don't dare get so hot that you might take something too far. Must be _so _frustrating, when a woman lets a careless peek show and you have to tell her to button her blouse." He seems to have found a new smudge on the table and is giving it an examination worthy of Abby.

"Or worse, she keeps her blouse up to the neck and her pants crossed because you _are _a Minister." Now he looks up and anger smolders in his eyes. He's not going to take much more of this. Question: _how _will he snap?

x

"Bet you've thought so often about what you'd do if there were no rules. But you can't. There are always rules. So she stands there bundled to the nines and you have to play don't touch - don't _look _- don't–"

"SHUT UP!" He whips out of the chair and she's ready, on her feet and prepared but he turns to the wall behind him. "Shut - UP!"

"Must be terrible, all those rules. She can tease and give you peek-a-boob; you can't touch, can't even _look_."

He turns on her, his fists clenched, his eyes volcanic.

"You must doubt your manhood every day. Can't get it up without beating the hell out of some woman."

He's shaking like a ten point earthquake and she steps around the table, steps close rather than away, seemingly oblivious to her danger while flashing through every karate and judo lesson she's ever had. "Can't get that cock hard without punching a woman."

They're inches away, his muscles are so tight it's like he's a statue in an earthquake. "Well, I'm not giving it either." She lowers her voice to an intimate tone devoid of intimacy or mercy. "Door's locked, we're alone, but you're never - _ever _- getting this soft ... hot ... tight pussy. Know why? Because you're not a man. A real man _takes _what he wants, but you're softer down there than I am - and there's only one way you're ever going to get this body..."

He turns away so suddenly he almost knocks her back, slams his fists against the wall. But he doesn't punch it, he pounds over and over as she backs away, and it's nearly a minute before he leans, exhausted, against it. When he turns, he's braced against the wall, worn and defeated.

"I believe you," she says, walks back to her chair and sits back down. She's not done. "Was there any time in your email conversations with Juliette Spenser," she hits the 's' hard, "that made you in any way suspicious that she wasn't being real?"

x

It takes him several moments to recover from this reversal, to force himself back to his chair, longer until he can think clearly. "You," he says, breath still weak but he's recovering his strength and composure, "are a _bitch_."

Rule 6 is never to say you're sorry. It's frequently the hardest one for her to keep, especially when she's had to be completely unfair. Then again, they never are going to be friends, so "Was there any time in your email conversations with Juliette Spenser that made you in any way suspicious that she wasn't being real?"

"No," he says so coldly she imagines icicles forming on the ceiling like stalactites. "She was a lot more real than you ever were."

Staring into his eyes, she sees he's going to fight her now but she doesn't mind. A verbal fight is fine, she prefers it over the alternative she'd risked.

She's not going to back down, not until she has everything. On her last interview, that time with Robert Ventura, she'd fled with her tail between her legs and even if Gibbs hasn't excluded her from observing Interviews she's felt excluded from the real thing. She's going to prove to Gibbs - and everyone else - that she has what it takes.

"How long have you been using dating websites?"

"What difference does that make?" Hastings demands. "I told you that's fantasy, not real life. I don't _do _that."

"I didn't say you did. I asked you how long you've been using dating websites."

"_WHY_?"

She tries not to show how it was like a hurricane in her sail. "Because I don't think the guy behind this picked you out on day one and randomly chose you as someone most likely to commit murder."

"I never did that!"

x

Count of ten, empty tone. "Mister Hastings, I can get a Court Order for every Internet Account run off your machine, and then our Cyber Crime Unit can pick your Internet life apart back to the moment the Internet was conceived - and you will sit right here until they're done - or you can cooperate with this Investigation into whoever set you up and then go back to your life."

She doesn't believe he'll ever visit an R or worse site for the rest of his life but she only cares that she needs this information to exonerate him and to catch Gibbs' 'Puppet Master' before the hùn zhàng manipulates someone else into killing some other deceived woman.

xxx

Gibbs calls for the women's report even before they enter from the rear of the bullpen. Ziva doesn't pause on her way to her desk, leaves Michelle to stop at the boss'. Left alone in center stage - she'd thought that as Senior, Ziva would deliver the report - she gives a capsule summary, knowing he'll either watch the interview for himself or had done so live. She concludes with "Hastings' palms were hardened, the skin rough from hard work," she'll write more detail later but "the backs of his hands were smooth for someone who supposedly gets into fights so I pressed him. It was like he went into a short circuit, I thought he was going to burn his brain out."

"Forbidden Planet," DiNozzo cuts in, "1957, MGM studios, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Neilsen."

A glance between them allowing they'll get nowhere until they resolve this cinematic allusion and thereby avoid another, they turn to him. "Well?" Gibbs demands.

"Sorry, boss. Couldn't help it."

"Help it."

"Doctor Mobius, played by Walter Pidgeon, orders Robbie the Robot to murder Commander Adams, played by Leslie Neilsen. Robbie pretty much short circuits, a battle between his programming not to kill verses a direct order. Sparks and lights bounce around in his head until Morbius rescinds the order."

Satisfied, Gibbs turns back to her and she turns her back on the senor agent, one of her favorite things to do with him. "Well, there were no sparks in his see-through head, but if it had been clear, the effect was pretty much the same. He wanted to slug me and couldn't, but when he started pounding on the wall it wasn't punches."

"All right, Palmer." He looks at the clock. "Write it up."

x

When the woman heads back to her desk, Gibbs reviews their position. Spencer is unlikely to make any unique breakthroughs with 8 Analysts working together on seemingly random assignments. There's just too little chance of her being the one to learn anything significant - and how would al Qaeda even know? For them to know would mean they had gotten to someone already, in which case–

This is a dead end. There's a Puppet Master out there who targeted Spencer for some unknown reason and used a clueless stooge who screwed up the murder plan because he either had a conscience or wanted confirmation of the target, perhaps both.

He detests clueless Investigations but at this moment he can find no viable justification for targeting Spencer with a multi-week operation that used an equally clueless pawn and certainly had no assurance of success.

The programming of brainwashed murderers by the Psychiatrist Samuel Richards - in the employ of McGillicuddy, Crocetti and Morrison - had at least been against clearly defined targets and had had the chance to succeed on a grand scale had it not been prematurely touched off. This plot, however, has too many random variables, had played out over too long a period and was a complete bust because the pawn had a moment of uncertainty.

From a planning standpoint, the scheme had been a disaster. Eight bullets wielded by a competent set of assassins against the eight Analysts would have been vastly more effective.

So assuming the scheme wasn't hatched by a complete idiot, what is it?

x

He pulls himself out of his reverie, looks to DiNozzo and David. "Get Hastings and Spencer to new Safe Houses, then turn in," he orders generally.

He won't order them to be ready in the morning to break this convoluted case.

"Yes, sir."


	8. Music Doth Not Hath Charms to Soothe the

Chapter Eight  
Music Doth Not Hath Charms to Soothe the Savage Breast

When Tim McGee arrives home it's to a dark and silent apartment. Shav had reminded him at breakfast that she's coordinating the usual First Wednesday of the month meeting of the 'Outreach Committee' and would be home late. She's usually home first, even on days when she's conducting Evening Eucharist and Healing Service because Gibbs often holds the clock at 1559 until well after sundown - even in the summer.

But this time he'd actually left at the real world's 1600 and had beaten the traffic through the city and across the Maryland border and now he's alone.

x

'Okay, I'm in a bad mood, so scourge me. We're only three months into our honeymoon and so _what _if I saw her every evening this week, that doesn't _count_. This is today.'

He looks around the apartment, seeing nothing that interests him; no distractions, nothing important, nothing new. There was no mail downstairs. He could tie his computer into the one at his desk and work but he doesn't want to work.

'Darn it, I should've gone to the Church. I could've waited for her for, what, an hour or two? I could've driven her home and then drop her off in the morning. Yeah, right, and Gibbs calls me in at 0500 and Shav's car is in the Church parking lot. Brilliant thinking, Tim.' He stalks across the room, glares out the window; it's the same view he had yesterday - and the day before - and the day before _that_ except there's no green Fiesta parked out there and Shav's not crossing the street….

He turns from the window and it's the same old apartment it's been for years. Empty. 'Okay, she has her job which is as important as mine is but darn it I want to _talk _with her. This case...

'No,' he decides, granting the inevitable truth, 'screw the case, it's not the case, I want Shav.'

x

He goes into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator door and lifts the large pot's lid. But as good as the stew she made yesterday looks and smells he doesn't care about it. 'It never tastes as good when she's not here.'

Coming back out, trying to avoid the utter immaturity of walking more heavily than he should, he heads for the bedroom but stops at his writing desk. He looks lovingly - longingly - at his typewriter, runs his fingers along the outer shell. He's alone now and wouldn't disturb anyone, the latest work in the 'Annals of L. J. Tibbs' is progressing but on his HP iPAQ rather than on his typewriter, a difficult compromise that he's still trying to get used to. But the struggle with the elusive Kilgaren has hit a snag that he does have to admit is easier to resolve with highlight and delete.

Okay, ever since March, two and a half months to now the first week of June, he can't spend his nights clicking away at the keys, liberating as the sound had been. Shav doesn't find the clicking as liberating at three in the morning and so when she'd bought him the pocket sized 'late wedding present' he'd received it with all due wisdom. True, his efficiency has increased dramatically, and he no longer has to remember a great scene that comes to him in the day and vanishes by the time he reaches the typewriter, but he misses the clicks.

'Maybe I can download an App.'

x

But this isn't what he wants to think about. He wants Shav here, he has so much to tell her and how many hours is that Conference going to run?

He leaves his mini-sanctum and stalks into the bedroom. The same room, almost the same furnishings, more than before but still leaving goodly space. Shav hadn't had much to her name; Mikel Mawher had seen to that with his bombs, so she'd brought only a dresser and a small bedside three drawer night table from the Rectory. A single shared walk-in closet takes care of most of the rest.

He goes around the bed and sits down, left side, closest to the bathroom, her side, and turns on her clock radio. It's set, as always, for Family Radio all the way from Newark, New Jersey, her favorite religious station and the Choir, some choir, is singing 'God will take care of you'.

He very much hopes so.

x

As the sonorous notes draw out he feels slightly more relaxed, that's its purpose, but not very relaxed. There's a tense core within him that music can't touch, even when another choir and organ take over with 'In the light of His Glory'.

He sits and listens, tries to give away the concern – she's going to be upset when he tells her about Hastings, but he can't ask for her advice until he does tell her. But even a few minutes later, when a duet rendition of 'My Faith looks up to Thee' takes over, he can find no more peace than the little already accorded him. The revelations of today are going to hurt Shav, and he can tell her or else Gibbs will.

'In the immortal words of L.J. Gibbs, 'that's not gonna happen'.'

x

He gets off the bed and goes to her dresser, backed to the bathroom wall and under the large circular wall mounted mirror. The second and third drawers contain underwear and other 'intimates', most lately of his own contribution from Victoria's Secret and other more scandalous services, but he normally doesn't invade the top drawer. He realizes with an ounce of surprise that in nearly three months he never has. She opens it, and he's seen inside plenty of times, but this is her drawer. It's not that he can't, it's just understood between them that, though he's seen inside scores of times, he won't.

He pulls the drawer open.

x

There's not a lot inside, certainly not enough to fill the drawer and, as a baritone on the radio sings 'Great is Thy faithfulness' to piano accompaniment, he looks over the contents.

There are two stacks of Clerical shirts - blouses - with high stiff collars that back up the detachable stiff white circular collars, the shades of blouses ranging from light through deep blue, and beside them lay, in a round leather zippered case, three stiff molded white circular collars with gold rear fasteners surrounding a small unopened pack of four stiff tabs designed to fit into the front necks of the blouses to form the squared tabs she doesn't use.

Along the rear of the drawer are stacked long stoles in six colors and varying designs, anything she might need if called out at a moment's notice. To the far right sits an eight by eight by six soft black case held with an attached strap.

He's seen it open dozens of times, has never before felt the urge to open it. He takes the case out, sets it on the bureau top and unzips the three sides. It's a seeming cosmic coincidence that the organ music reaches a crescendo as he lifts the upper half.

Secured in webbing on top and bottom are all the things she needs, in miniature, for Sick Calls; silver chalice with metal cover, a Pyx containing a dozen consecrated Eucharists, a round tray - the paten - used to hold the hosts, a four ounce silver topped bottle filled with already consecrated red wine.

She doesn't use even a small Book of Common Prayer, having memorized that book along with others when concern about inevitable blindness drove her to these cautions. While her vision is no longer at risk, she need not read such passages as 'Communion under Special Circumstances', 'Ministration of the Sick' or 'Ministration at the Time of Death'. He doesn't know what it took to commit those books to memory, he's only relieved she didn't have to.

Finally, cushioning the metal and glass accoutrements in their webbings is a long, several times folded four inch wide strip of silk.

He takes the stole out, holds the middle and lets it fall open. It's two sided, white and purple, embroidered with two plain gold crosses on each end and two smaller ones under his fingers for a total of six. When she wears it the stole extends on each side to her waist and he turns one side, white and purple now side by side, trying to decide, while the radio plays 'Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet', which color is more appropriate for tonight.

No matter how long he studies the two silken sides, they give him no answer.

"What do you want to tell me?"

x

He turns so sharply about toward the soft brogue that he nearly wrenches his neck and back. Shav stands in the doorway, wearing her 'uniform' - royal blue short sleeved, white collared shirt and black skirt - and he's vastly relieved that she's not angry.

"Shav, I'm _sorry_, I really am. I - I wasn't expecting you home so soon." He tries to refold the stole but he can't follow the creases to get the simple folds right.

"We didn't have a quorum," she says, coming around the foot of the bed. "I guess it's too nice an evening."

Her hands feel so soft and warm as she retrieves the stole from his fumbling fingers, kisses the small gold cross at its middle and folds it, sets it back into the case. "You're allowed," she says up to his eyes - three inches separate her five and ten from him when she's in flats. She zippers the case, replaces it in the drawer without a glance. "But you normally don't." There's no annoyance in her tone, nothing in her gaze that he doesn't long for whenever they're together.

Her gentle touch at his arms brings him to the kiss he's longed for since nine hours before he came home and, embracing her, he tries to draw it out for a couple of weeks. But when he draws back far enough to see her, love and concern are reflected in her emerald eyes.

"You being in here," she says, sliding the drawer shut without looking from his eyes, "tells me you're bothered. Being in that case tells me you're _really _bothered." When he lets go a month before he wants to, she steps past him, switches off the radio on her night table during the 'Sanctus' - he'd never imagined her doing _that _- and comes back to him before she asks "What's bothering you?"

x

He still hasn't found the words but after ten seconds she pulls the drawer back open, reaches toward the stack in the rear. "Should I?" but she stops at his hand on hers before she can touch the purple one. Her emerald eyes change, reflect not just love and concern now but true fear.

Leaving the drawer open she hugs him, doesn't say anything for several seconds. He doesn't either.

"Tell me, please," she says, her head on his shoulder, her brogue hushed yet tight with strongly held emotion, "in two words or less: Who died?"

"What? _No_. No, no one."

She pulls back, her eyes aren't fearful but "Then why are you acting like Tom Hagan when he couldn't tell Don Corleone that Sonny took a hit on the Causeway?"

x

It takes him a moment to remember 'the Godfather' and that only sparks its own guilt. What must he have looked like? "No. I'm sorry. No. Nothing like that. I'm just trying to figure out how to tell you something without your getting mad at me."

"In that case, a chuisla, fast."

"Fast?"

"Very fast."

"NCIS is holding Robert Hastings on conspiracy to rape and murder a Marine Corporal."

x

Her emerald eyes widen and her face loses most color. "You couldn't prepare me gently?" she breathes.

"You said–"

She squeezes his arms and turns back, steps to and sits upon the edge of the bed, crosses herself, takes a deep breath and lets it out in "Tell me."

xx

He keeps the tale as short as possible but there's nothing sweet about it. Though he takes great pains to emphasize that Hastings is a witness rather than a suspect, he actually watches her assemble her mask, the one she puts upon her features when she doesn't want to share anything with parishioners.

He stresses the distinction of Hastings from Haystings, Spencer from Spenser, but sometimes even he and his fellow agents got confused if not for artificially overstressing the differences.

When he tells her about what he'd found on Hastings' hard drive, the various images and downloaded videos that seem to support the supposed 'Puppet Master's' selection of this was man as one who would do what he'd been set up to do, her mask is strong as titanium.

He's not surprised, knowing her as he does, that when he finishes his outrageous litany the first thing she wants to know is "Can I see him?"

"I don't think Gibbs would approve at this point." He knows his wife well enough to know she'd either go over Gibbs' head with Director Shepherd or try to walk through the rules by virtue of being NCIS' Chaplain, so he's surprised when she says

"Fine. Later."

"_Fine_?"

"I know what you're thinking, a grá, but I'm not going to do it. I have to talk with George." He supposes his face betrays him - again - because she's even more practical and orderly than being the concerned priest and friend. "This is very, very serious and the Rector of Saint Mary the Virgin - not the Curate - has some decisions to make. He'll ask Jennifer for time to see Bob."

"I thought you'd want to go in like Gangbusters."

"No." She's silent for several moments. He won't interrupt her. He knows her well enough to know she's splitting emotion from duty, pushing them as far apart as she can, and when she's able to say it, she will.

x

"Even if I wanted to, I can't. This issue is, how do you say it, 'above my pay grade'."

"What do you mean?"

She stands up, the better to speak to him. "A representative - a member of the _staff _of Saint Mary's - has been accused, or however the law addresses it, in a crime involving moral turpitude. I'm required to pass it along to the Rector. He may have to pass it to Bishop Metcalf."

"_Whoa_!" His hands would block her but she's not going anywhere. "I told you. I didn't tell Donaldson - and I certainly did not tell the Bishop."

"Too late. You told me something I cannot keep from my Rector."

'Oh... _Frack_.' When she says it like this, 'cannot', he knows she means far more than 'can't'. "Yes you can. NCIS has a lid on this; you can't say anything."

"I'm not sure I–"

"You _won't_!"

x

Her eyes slowly widen. "Timothy McGee," her voice grows cold enough to chill his blood, "did you just give me an _Order_?"

"Err, well, um, yes I did."

The outrage vanishes from her face. "Good. Thank you."

"_Thank me_?" This is going too fast. He'd been ready - no, he hadn't been - for a battle of wills, each of them right, not–

"Did you think for one instant that I _wanted _to follow that rule?" She smiles, and he's not sure if it's because she's won or because she's completely flummoxing him. Again. "But a Federal Agent in charge of an active Investigation ordering me, a civilian employee, to keep silent; if anything goes wrong it's not my neck on the chopping block."

"Good."

"It's yours."

Her smile is sweet, no victory like anyone else might display, more the teasing he's used to, but he thinks it over. "Fine. I'm not scared of the Bishop, I'm scared of Gibbs."

xx

Tim takes the large pot of stew out of the refrigerator and sets it on the stove, but when he turns the flame on and turns around Shav is standing on the other side of the low counter that separates kitchen from living room. Her only change is she's removed the white circling collar and opened her first button. "Timmy?"

"Yes?"

Her emerald eyes, how is it possible that they reflect even greater consternation than earlier? "Something about that story, rape and beat to death, sounds an awful lot like what happened in Rosemary Hills a couple of weeks ago."

"What did?" Rosemary Hills is far enough from Sligo Park that he can be forgiven - by himself - for not having any idea what she's talking about.

"You remember, Margaret something, about two - three weeks ago."

Margaret something? Two weeks...? "No, I don't."

"We heard it on the news." Nothing. "While we were having breakfast." Still no bells. "Come on, Margaret ... something. I had a meeting at the National Cathedral that morning." Still a glaring blank hole as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. "My clothes were still in the Cleaner bag so I had to serve you in my _underwear_."

"Oh _Yes_."

"_That _you remember." She doesn't look really annoyed however.

"I prioritize." He can see this wasn't a winner, decides to switch to "It was the most delicious breakfast in weeks."

This gets him a little kinder look but he sees in her eyes that he's pushed to his limit.

"The News says they haven't, last I heard - which I admit was a few days ago - found any suspect," she tells him. "What if it was–?"

"Someone who had nothing to do with her!" He moves quickly around the counter, hugs and kisses her - twice - and rushes to his computer station.

x

He's never too absorbed in anything, give it 99 percent right now, that he's unaware of his wife. He hears her at the stove and, a few moments later while the Search Engine - why can't the Internet be as fast as his system? - scans the planet, he hears the microwave programming buttons beeping. "Shav?"

"Jethro is going to pull everyone back for the rest of the night and you are _not _driving back to Washington without eating your dinner."

xx

Leroy Jethro Gibbs is winding down in his home, trying to force enough of the day's tension away and just sitting down to his own dinner when his cell phone chimes in his pocket. He pulls it out, sees by the screen that it's an acceptable interruption and flips it open. "What've you got, McGee?"

/Boss,/ Tim says as he types too loudly on something, /I think I may have found something related to our case. There was a beating death up here in Silver Spring a couple of weeks ago. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, it wasn't an NCIS case and we were dealing with the Presit / Wetzel / Hudson et cetera case./

"What _is _it, McGee?"

/Juussst coommmiiinng uuuuup _now_./

"I can hear that, McGee." This is really getting annoying, more so because he can't get stop the man.

/Sorry, boss. Margaret Tragule was found a few days after she had been murdered in Silver Spring, in Rosemary Hills west of Shav and I. It had been reported in the Beacon on May 21st, a week before the Memorial Day weekend. We were busy with the 'Wetzel / Presit et cetera' serial case then and, as I said, it wasn't an NCIS case, so I forgot about it./

"Your priorities are skewed." He decides not to coin a rule about it, however.

/We heard about it on a Friday morning, I didn't pay much attention but it says here that Metro PD has the case at 'Cooling Off'. No leads, only one 'Person of Interest', a co-worker who turned out to have an iron clad alibi./

"What were the circumstances?"

/Body was found in her living room, naked and Cause of Death was multiple blunt force trauma throughout her body. No indication of a weapon, she seems to have been beaten to death. Rape kit was positive. So far, there's no hit on the DNA tests./

"Then the prep may not have Served or have been arrested."

/I'd say not./

"Pull everything there is on that case, have it ready for the morning and then search for similar cases. I'll have DiNozzo see what he can scare up through his contacts through Baltimore."

x

He's about to cut the signal and call DiNozzo when the memory hits him like a setting maul to the forehead.

"Wait."

/Yes, boss?/

He'd sought Abby's input on a case a few weeks ago and had found her lower than a Sniper, hung over from several 'Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters' yet three times as bent on murder.

He'd had no interest in what those concoctions contained, but had mercy on his favorite scientist - truth be told the only scientist he likes - and had communicated with her by Sign. Through that method he'd learned the reason for her state, and that if she was as low as a Sniper, her roommate Samantha Sky was deep in a foxhole.

o

**A few days ago** Abby'd Signed so forcefully Gibbs hadn't been sure she wouldn't sprain a wrist, **one of her friends, Paula Massey, girl we knew from Sodom and Gomorrah, got seriously Gay Bashed. She never saw it coming, never even saw him, but the guy beat her until she was three-quarters dead, then robbed her. Paula didn't wake up for four days, she's in ICU at GWU Hospital.**

**But alive.** He has no tolerance for people who abuse women, but to give in and show how he'd felt wouldn't have helped.

**Yeah. When she found out, Sammy was up to a million. It took a while to bring her down, but the Gargle Blasters did it. When I left her this morning she couldn't even roll off the couch.**

He smiled, signing **Surprised you made it in and out of your coffin.**

**What makes you think I made it that far?**

He hadn't wanted to pursue this and had returned to his original question.

o

/Boss?/ He realizes McGee's been repeating it several times.

"McGee, run a check on Paula Massey." He spells it off the recollection of Abby's flashing fingers.

/What am I looking for?/

"Why she landed in the hospital a couple of weeks ago."

/Pulling Metro EMT/911 calls./

x

Gibbs breaks the connection and calls up the Contact List on his phone, selects a number he'd programmed as a matter of course but never thought he'd use.

The phone buzzes only three times. /Hello?/ the young woman's voice asks tentatively.

"Sky, Gibbs."

/Oh, _wow_! Special Agent _Gibbs_! How _are _you?/

The girl – young woman – is the only one he knows who's fluent in the language of emphatics, but he has no time for that now. "Fine. Calling about your friend Massey. How is she?"

/Huh? How'd-? Of course, Abby. That _bastard _beat her with a baseball bat or something,/ she's suddenly no longer the mirthful sprite he knows and had to endure so often. /Her face is wrapped like the Invisible Woman from seven breaks, jaw wired together so she can barely talk, he broke twenty one bones, shattered her pelvis, it's a wonder she's _alive_. If her partner hadn't come home when she did, she wouldn't be./

"Where is she now?"

/Still in GWU Hospital but out of ICU. She'll be there for _weeks_. Why? I mean I appreciate you're calling, it's just that you don't call./

"Working a case." He won't tell her which.

/Oh _wow_! You're on her _case_? Why? I mean, can _I help_? I've got some really good–/*

If she's not used to the way he ends conversations by now she never will be.

x

The Doctor and Apprentice ME is smart - she'd trained, however briefly, under Ducky - but the girl could probably talk herself onto a case and team faster than Karen Wetzel could.

A quick redial and he's once again connected to McGee. /Yes, boss?/

"Send everything you get on Tragule to DiNozzo and then on Massey, at GWU Hospital, to Palmer. You and David keep tracking Hastings and Spencer and the fake ones."

/Right, boss./


	9. Jigsaw

Chapter Nine  
Jigsaw

"DiNozzo," Gibbs calls from his desk the instant the Senior Field Agent, together with David, Palmer and McGee, enters the bullpen, fresh from their upstairs Café breakfast. "What do you have on Margaret Tragule from Rosemary Hills on May 20th?"

It's 0658 but he doesn't feel generous; he's been at his desk since 0521 and it's about time the others showed up.

DiNozzo ducks behind his desk, casting resentful glances at his colleagues. His computer's not even booted up, they'll have prep time before being hit but all he has is what McGee had passed on to him last night.

"Not a heck of a lot," he says, his voice still conveying annoyance he can't express openly. Being first on the hot seat is not his idea of a good Thursday morning. "Margaret Tragule worked as a computer troubleshooter for Sprint Telecomm. From her office she could remotely access systems all over the East Coast, tweak their problems to make them go away."

"Access to anything sensitive?"

"Depends upon how you describe 'sensitive'. She could get into Sprint's whole system, see anything, remotely control any terminal or computer, even whole systems. But this is Sprint, not the Pentagon. And before you ask, she couldn't access the Pentagon. Basically, it was Sprint to Sprint, she had those passwords, could go in and fix bugs. What couldn't be solved on-line she drove to the site and took the innards apart."

"What about her record? Clearance?"

He shakes his head. "Boss, that's it on what I have on her from McPeepshow here. I called her place, her boss won't even be in for another two hours. I'll see him and find out if there's anything to tell."

x

Gibbs is impressed to get that much and decides to have mercy. This next is more along DiNozzo's line. "What about the Police Report?"

"Rosemary Hills isn't Boston. I had to give people I never heard of my Marker for favors, but I didn't get much more than you already have so I'm down several favors in the loss column."

"You'll make them up."

"We'll see. Tragule was found nude in her living room, cause of death was multiple blunt force trauma; basically she was beaten to death. The only viable suspect was a co-worker witnesses reported had argued with her regularly stroke daily. However, he had an airtight alibi, he was at a party until well after the estimated range of death time and also didn't match the sperm found in and on her. So far no ID on that."

"Computer?"

"That'll take some Inter-Department finesse, but I left a message for the Investigating Detective about what to look for. His shift should be on now; I'll call to find what turns up."

"You do that. Palmer, what did you turn up?"

x

"Well, sir," she reads from her computer monitor, "the biggest difference I found, if the cases are related, is that Margaret Tragule is dead and Paula Massey isn't, though not for the perp's lack of trying. Massey's a friend of Sammy Sky, they belong to the same Adult Club, 'Sodom and Gomorrah', which is how we–" She looks away from her screen toward Gibbs' glare. "Yes, sir. Well, Massey was also found in her apartment, naked and beaten to a pulp - and her rape test was also positive."

"DiNozzo."

"Send word to Rosemary Hills Detective Lipp to cross reference Rape Kit results; on it, boss."

"That may pay you off a favor. What else, Palmer?"

"Massey works at Luxuria, a woman's clothing store." She manipulates something on her computer. "According to her tax records she's been there for almost three years. Before that she waitressed at La Monde over on 6th Northwest. Parents live in Cocoa, Florida. No family connection to Navy or Marines."

He hears her cautioning. If Tragule is also outside their jurisdiction, very likely, then their connection to this case has grown tenuous, 2 - 1 against. It's starting to feel like Clarkston Lakes again, where friendship is all that defines their involvement - that is until another Naval Officer such as Lieutenant Martinka is murdered.

"For now," his command rings through the bullpen, "this is still a threat against a Marine Corporal assigned to the Pentagon."

"Yes, boss," McGee says, still working on her supposed attacker's computer records from the mirrored hard drive. The original and main copy both still remain secure in Evidence Holding.

"Understood," Ziva confirms while searching Spencer's laptop's duplicated records regarding her supposed date with 'Haystings'. She can't go on-line without revealing to their target that Spencer's still alive but the woman didn't make many off-line references to her 'date'.

Fortunately, perhaps to preserve detail as in Hastings' case, the last exchange Spencer had confirming her blind date with 'Haystings' had been copy / pasted into a Word document.

x

"Palmer, what more?"

"I called Sammy last night - no sir, I didn't let her talk me into letting her join the case–"

"Good thing."

"But I found out that, like Sammy, Paula is also bisexual, but _un_like her Paula Massey prefers to fly under the radar; or as Special Agent DiNozzo might say, the gaydar."

"Not this time," DiNozzo says, drawing all eyes to him, but his expression is serious. "It's all fun and games until someone breaks a body."

x

"Well," Michelle recovers, sounding like she's not sure how to deal with a serious [mature?] DiNozzo, "Massey was beaten with a cylindrical object Jimmy says is consistent with a metal baseball bat."

She's stopped by Gibbs' scowl. "He called the hospital, he knows one of the Lab people, got him to admit there was no wood in any of the injuries, but that they ranged from three to four inches wide. Not conclusive, but consistent," she concludes in sharp defense.

Gibbs is willing to grant this as a working theory pending his own check. The Doctor and Journeyman ME has worked with Ducky for several years and has been described by the man as 'very competent'. That's good enough for the moment.

"What was her condition?"

"She was admitted by GWU a few weeks ago as Critical and has only recently been removed from Intensive Care. Her condition now is Guarded. She's had four operations so far, the–" She fights down anger until she can continue with an empty voice. "He fractured her pelvis in four places and _then_ raped her."

No one wants to hear more and Michelle doesn't want to say it.

x

"McGee, you got that bug on Hastings and Spencer's computers yet?"

"Both the units are in Evidence Lockup, but I have Hastings' Yahoo account active while I monitor background activity. None yet"

"Pretty soon our guy's going to start sniffing around them, wondering why there's no report of Spencer getting killed. Body won't be discovered for a couple of days." Much better this way than to declare Spencer dead and put her through the trouble of coming back to life. "Palmer, you're with me."

xxx

When Juliette Spencer steps out of the bedroom she looks about Theta Safe Apartment's living room. As a prison cell to keep the innocent in, the room is as dismal as she feels. Tina Larsen is seated on the couch reading a magazine. "I'd hoped this was a dream," she announces.

"Your bedroom looks like that?"

She shakes her head, lowering herself into a chair. "No."

"There's coffee in the pot."

Spencer likes the idea but not enough to get out of the chair. "I'm going stir crazy."

"Spoons're in the top left drawer."

This does pull Spencer's attention back into the room. "That's supposed to be funny?"

"Nope." The woman hasn't glanced up once from the open magazine upon her lap.

"Then why'd you say it?"

Larsen finally looks up. "I've been doing these safety jobs so often I know every crack in every wall of every apartment. No one can go out for a breath of fresh air and by this point everyone goes stir crazy.

"Idiot bastard falls for some con, comes to me to try and kill me and now I'm stuck here for God knows how long instead of being at the Pentagon doing some _real _work."

x

Larsen doesn't even move at this and Spencer has to concede, unhappily, that it'd been a cheap shot born of and nurtured by frustration. "If I could I'd hunt down that bastard and rip his balls off."

"Which bastard?"

The question halts her for a moment. "The one behind this, Haystings with a 'y'." She slaps the arm of the chair. "God, I should have smelled something when that bastard wanted me to dress all in pink. I hate pink, that whole boy blue / girl pink shit."

"Your mother dressed you in pink."

Juliette looks more closely to her; it hadn't soundly remotely like a question. "How'd you know?"

"Everyone I've ever met that had an aversion to it was smothered in it when she was young. And the older she was before it stopped, then either the more she hated it or she got locked into it."

"Well, I put a stop to it as quickly as I could. Now I never want another swatch of pink on me." She reaches for the magazine, changes her mind. It's five months old and she wouldn't have been interested in it when it was new. "What about you? What's your story?"

"Depends. Most of the time I'm an Oster."

"Come again?"

"A blender. Depending on the job, I tend to blend in."

"I thought you were like Tony. An Investigator."

"No. He's part of an MCR Team. Major Case Response. There are twelve of them in all. They go out in the Field, do the Investigations, solve the crimes. Me, I go where I'm told to go and do what I'm told to do. One day it might be providing Security for an Admiral, guarding an Embassy or a Conference, transporting evidence or securing a Crime Scene, doing Surveillance-"

"Or babysitting a witness."

"Or babysitting a witness."

xxx

It's never hard for Federal Agents to enter a hospital to speak to an assault victim, much less so when it's Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who has never met a bureaucratic rule he hasn't beaten senseless and left a whimpering pile of letters in some back alley, or in this case in search of intensive care of its own.

After another conversation with Samantha Sky while on the way over, this one instigated by her, he gains entrance into Paula Massey's George Washington University Hospital room through the simplest of methods; knowing the room number he opens her door and leads Michelle Palmer inside.

Fortunately he neither startles the redheaded young woman nor does he catch her unclothed. She is, in fact, asleep and quite worse for her experience.

Paula Massey had, on the MPDC records McGee had tapped, been found in her apartment by her 'Companion' Debbie Maizer after what neighbors eventually got around to describing as some 'fifteen minutes of shrieking and heavy banging on walls that were violent enough to dislodge pictures in their adjacent apartments'.

Eventually the crashes and shaking walls had ended but the screaming had lasted quite some time longer before it eventually quieted and neighbors could return to their television programs without the bi-lezbo making so much noise.

That is until the other bi-lez got in a half hour later and the rude, annoying screaming had started again.

x

When police had arrived in response to Debbie Maizer's hysterical summons, there'd been almost as much blood covering walls and floor as was left in Paula Massey's body.

He'd learned from Sky that Ducky had been persuaded - he suspects that persuading had taken the form of abject begging and pleading - to look in on and evaluate Massey's condition. Ducky had reported nothing of this extra-duty work, it being outside NCIS' jurisdiction. The venerable doctor and the fledgling one had reached the same conclusion, that it was either by sheer luck or the intercession of a Higher Power that the woman had survived transport to the Emergency Room.

x

Massey lays still. Both her plaster casted arms are extended by her sides, secured to pairs of long, blue, heavy plastic boards to keep them immobile. Her head is wrapped by layers of gauze that allow only eyes, nostrils and mouth to be visible through horizontal slots. Both her legs are secured as her arms are, but her left foot is further encased in a plaster boot. Gibbs gently nudges her left shoulder. "Miss Massey?"

When her eyes stir behind the closed lids he does this again and gradually those green eyes open.

He expects from the cast of her eyes that she was anticipating someone in white rather than two strangers in white lettered black. "I'm Special Agent Gibbs," he holds his ID and shield directly above so she can see it comfortably. "This is Special Agent Palmer. We're with NCIS."

Her smile is very slow and filled with effort. "Me-eat Innn - spec - torsssss," she whispers, the words slurred, her teeth not separating. He gives her a little smile in return. Many have misinterpreted the agency's designation for New Cattle Inspection System, but rarely with such evidently forced humor.

"Can you tell us what happened to you?"

"Yesss," she whispers, her jaw not moving. "Whyy?"

"We're investigating an assault similar to yours."

Several slow blinks. "Nnnn... C... Sssss... Why fa-milll-yer?" Her words are toneless breaths, as if to add inflection was too much work.

"You know Abby Sciuto? Samantha Sky?"

Several slow blinks, long moment puzzling. "Sod... Dom ... Go...mor...rah. Samm- mee an I... memmm-bers. Ab..beey... guesssst... sstraight... but oh... kay."

Michelle moves to the other side of the bed, opposite Gibbs so Paula can see her. The bandaged woman doesn't move her head but her eyes shift to each of them in turn. "Why-e yuuu heerr?"

"Can you tell us what happened, who did this to you?"

Again the scanning inspection, the distrust heavy in her eyes. He doesn't blame her. She'd opened her door to an incredibly violent beating, now she's spent several weeks in agony, flat on her back, nearly twenty bones broken, pelvis cataclysmically damaged from a rape _after _her bones were broken, fed by tubes, unable even to use a bathroom or wash herself without help...

x

"You," she's looking left, locked on Palmer. "Wit...chhhh?"

Michelle looks down. Within her open light jacket that's still too warm, her silver circled star surrounding a tiny cross, a gift from Jimmy to honor her combined faiths, is visible above the V of her cream colored blouse. She meets Massey's eyes. "Yes."

"Wha ... Cov...ven?"

"Rising Star," she says, glancing up at Gibbs. He reads in her eyes a hope she can make a connection that he can't. "I'm sorry. If I'd known you were a Sister I would have reached out earlier. What Coven do you hail from?"

"Don...kno... Not wit ... chh. Fr-nd. 'Crossss...roads'."

"I know it." Her look up to Gibbs again tells him all he needs to know; Palmer can't establish a connection. Doesn't matter. It only matters that she'll trust them.

"Miss Massey. Can you tell us what happened?"

The eyes shift back to him. "Had ... a day-t. On liynnn. O...pen-d door. _Hit _... me. Kep... hit- ting ... me. Coul- nt..."

"Do you know who it was?"

Smallest of shakes. "Noooo. Sez ... met ... me. Dnnn r'mem...ber himm. Weee ... e-mlled... a lot. Tol hmmm whrr fine mee. Jssst _hit _mee."

Tears slip from her eyes, trickle down each side into the overlapping gauze which meets at her temples.

"Can you remember anything about him?" Michelle presses. "Anything at all?"

Tiny shake. "Thyyyy sayyy... mi n't _walk _well. Whyyyy? _Whhyyyyy_! Whadd _I _dooo - de-sherv thsss?"

x

Michelle reaches out, eyes closed, places her hands on the woman's encased arm. A moment later Massey gasps, her eyes alight, her body evidently feeling - something.

"Palmer," Gibbs says, a warning tone.

"Yes, sir," she says, her voice choked to a whisper. She pulls her hands away, draws a step back. It's as if Massey felt some kind of charge; now it's gone and her body relaxes again. But then

"_PNK_!" The word virtually explodes through Massey's clamped jaw.

"What?" Gibbs tries not to make it a demand.

"Pnk. Hee innn..._sis_...ted I weer _pink_. Heee nsistdd."

Pink. When they'd gotten to Juliette Spencer's apartment she'd been covered in it before she'd changed before being taken to the Safe House. He'll have DiNozzo check; Margaret Tragule had been found nude on her floor but had she started her evening in pink?

"Why did he want you to wear pink?"

"Donnn... no. Sssd Iiiii... Ssed he wann - td... me pnk. Allll pnk."

"When did he start insisting this?"

Eyes closed, lips pressed tight, she starts to cry again.

xx

Outside the room, Michelle would move away, hurry to the exit. Gibbs won't let her. "Palmer."

She turns, but the small woman can only meet his eyes in glimpses. "Yes, sir?"

"What was that about?"

She glimpses his eyes. "Sir, I..." Down. Away. Back. "Sir, I..." Down. Back up. "Sir, can I tell you the truth?"

"You'd better."

"Sir, I wanted to _help_."

The emphasis she gives it tells him how she would help. They'd discussed this thing infrequently, he'd not believed in her 'talents' until they'd been very dramatically displayed to him when Palmer - Jimmy - her husband-to-be - had been shot. He'd actually helped her with her magic but he hadn't understood what she'd done, just did what she'd asked when she'd asked it and it seemed to make a difference, but he'd never asked afterwards what had happened and how.

He hadn't truly wanted to know, hadn't wanted this - stuff - in his life or world and still they don't discuss it. He'd rather it would disappear, but that's unreasonable. Perhaps the day is coming when they should discuss it.

Not today, but maybe the day is coming.

Maybe.

x

"How would you help?"

"I can take away her pain, if only for a few hours."

"She has meds for that."

She looks down, breaking the contact again.

"Can you heal her?" He can hardly believe he's asking this as a serious question.

She shakes her head, staring at the floor. "No." It's a soft, pained admission. "I haven't that power. I have all sorts of powers, but not that one." It takes her a long moment to force her eyes up. "The Goddess lets me ease pain, but I can't cure."

'The Goddess' again. How can he deal with this, with this Episcopalian witch?

This is actually worse, harder, than his dealings with McGee's wife, with her talk of Faith and Grace and Reconciliation. Granted she doesn't go on as he's known many Padres – Madres? – to do so, but he's always uncomfortable with her. He treats her, always, with triply-distilled courtesy as a Priest, a co-worker and his team mate's wife, but he's always more comfortable at a distance.

"I can ease pain with a touch," Palmer continues her explanation, unaware of his mental wandering, "can offer infusion of the Goddess' strength through myself, but I can't _heal _and that is what this woman needs and, Goddess forgive me, I can't do that."

x

He searches for a meaningful answer. Mother McGee should be taking this, not him. This is her territory. Palmer's eyes are imploring, searching - but he has nothing to show. Since when did he become 'Mister Sensitivity' that someone would come to him with her problems? His solution to most is a head smack and a stern 'Get over it'; but they have an understanding for a year now – she doesn't get smacks.

"What real good does it do," she implores, "to have powers if I can't do what I really want to do when I have to do it?"

"I don't know."

"Sir?"

"I'm the wrong one to ask. I wouldn't even believe in any of this if I hadn't seen what you did with your husband when he was shot, but I don't understand a bit of it. What I've seen you do isn't in any reality I can deal with. McGee, DiNozzo and David are the same," he tells her, betraying no confidences. She knows, and if _she _has trouble dealing, he can't help that either. "All I can tell you... is stop beating yourself up."

"But–."

"You can't heal with a touch. Neither can I. Neither can anyone I know. Live with it. Don't beat yourself up over what you can't do. Beat yourself up over the things you can do and don't."


	10. In A Net

Chapter Ten  
In A Net

After returning with Michelle Palmer to Building 111 on the southern edge of the Navy Yard, Gibbs sends her up from the garage to get a Warrant to obtain Massey's computer records from her companion Debbie Maizer, but then pauses before heading after her for the elevator.

It seems that, rather than being the 'Gay Bashing' Hate Crime it was suspected to be, the bisexual woman is a victim of the 'Puppet Master'. This sets the entire situation in a new light and Gibbs isn't happy at all about what it illuminates.

He considers, alone and in silence for many moments, his next move. His people are hard at work on the various aspects of a very convoluted case. He doesn't have to consult his gut this time, the similarities of the two completed and one aborted assault are too similar for this to be other than a single case.

At this point he'd seek out professional aid from Ducky through his phenomenal skill in Psychological Autopsy. Before that, he'd turn to Kate Todd and her Profiler training.

But Kate's dead and Ducky's in Scotland, so he has no one to turn to. Okay, NCIS has Profilers and Psychologists, but none he trusts to analyze a paper bag. Kate's sister? Maybe, if he wanted to take the time to summon Rachel Cranston and bring her up to date, even if he could get around the fact that she's not NCIS. He's used to just taking the elevator to the sub-basement and... 'Oh, the Hell with it.'

She's an ME, she's Ducky's choice of a substitute and Ducky knows what he needs.

He knows the woman's intelligent.

Time to bite the proverbial bullet and see if she's smart.

When the elevator stops at the sub-basement Gibbs doesn't get off. This is blind hope and wishful thinking, and he'd been content with his decision not to enter Autopsy until Ducky's return unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Now he's taking an unwilling step into the avoidable.

His hand is sharp at the back of his own head before he steps off the car.

x

When Autopsy's pneumatic doors hiss apart Palmer and the pseudo-Kate Todd turn to him from Ducky's desk. Palmer's standing but the light brown haired Kate doppelganger stands and greets him with a too bright smile.

"Good afternoon."

"Hasn't been yet." He sees Palmer wants to say something; he doesn't care what for the man's expression resembles someone's who's watching a train wreck from a long ten seconds out.

If he just concentrates on her name - Maura Isles isn't Caitlyn Todd and never could be - this conversation might be manageable. "How's your profile?"

She smiles a vaguely confused smile, smoothes her blue smock and half turns left. "Pretty good, I guess. I've had no complaints."

"My mistake," he turns back to the door.

"No, please." Clicking footsteps. When he turns back she's closer but stops. The clicking was from high heel slippers. Who wears high heels in Autopsy? Okay, there's no body on a table and the last woman here, other than Jordan Hampton, was Samantha Sky and she _did _wear high heels when working but she's seven inches shorter than Ducky...

"I'm sorry," Isles says. "We got off wrong, I can see that. What may I do for you?"

xx

Though he doubts the usefulness of the exercise, he brings the woman up to date. Doing so, it's hard to shake the feeling that Kate Todd is standing before him, that the last few years have been a nightmare and that his team is back and whole.

But it isn't. That team is irrevocably gone, one woman has been replaced by two and only an accident of genetics, which subject has never been high on his list, has put this woman with this body and face before him.

But she's not Kate, she's Isles, and the sooner he can get used to that the happier and more content he'll be.

Now to see if she's worth a damn as a Profiler.

'I'm so sorry, Kate. If I hadn't let my guard down for that one _damned _second...'

x

"Okay," the woman he'd never wanted to meet says when he finishes, "let's see. You're looking for someone who's not only manipulative but capable of carrying on double manipulations until he brings his victims to the point of cataclysm.

"He'd be in his 20's, early 30's; unlikely to be much older. He has difficulty establishing relationships so he's probably a loner. He focuses on the impersonal medium of the Internet rather than establishing those relationships with real persons on a one-on-one basis and thereby exposing himself. Manipulation is an important part of his personal expression."

Gibbs is impressed. He hadn't expected her to have this much perception - he hadn't expected her to have any, in fact. He'll take everything from her. If she's competent at this, maybe these two Duckyless weeks won't be such a burden. "That all?"

"Not quite. The fact that your Corporal and Baggage Handler were so taken in that one thought she was going on a date and the other thought he was fulfilling a Death Wish, together with your hospitalized victim's testimony, makes me think the same scenario is being played out over and over again."

x

Death wish. He really should call Abby when he gets back upstairs. But "That much is obvious."

"What we have, however, is someone replaying a favorite fantasy over and over again; the pink clothing, the baseball bat of some similar object to administer the beating. Do you know if Margaret...?"

"Tragule."

"Was raped after she was beaten, before or both?"

He doesn't, but within the half hour he intends to.

"This can be particularly significant, particularly if the pattern follows the attack on Paula Massey. It would mean he wants to inflict the maximum damage to his victim. They may well have died from hemorrhages resulting from the trauma of the rapes rather than from the blunt force. You say Corporal Spencer was to be beaten and then raped, in that order?"

"Yes. What else?"

"The fixation on stereotypical factors; pink for girls, baseball bat for boys; I think that in this case the bats are more than phallic symbols, they represent a distinction in the male/female world view."

"How does he get these idiots to carry out their parts of the plan?" This is what has bothered him more deeply than the plain facts of the assaults. "Three times that we know of, maybe more we don't, guys were tricked into murdering perfect strangers."

"I don't have enough, not without meeting at least one of them. But male to female aggression and the desire for conquest are both very powerful aspects of the male psyche."

"The average man doesn't start a 'relationship' by beating the woman's head in."

x

"No, that takes a certain kind of psyche; fortunately very rare yet very distinctive; the iconic Cave Man image. And if your man is selecting these 'tools', substitutes for the classic Cave Man club, it may mean he probably recognized something of himself in them."

"May? Probably?"

"Profiling isn't an exact science, not like my telling you the caliber of a bullet and where it entered and left. I freely admit I can be wrong in any number of determinations. Many of your departments determine from the general to the specific; in Profiling we take the specific and reason to the general, to the kind of person who will be consistent with the evidence and psychological trends.

"That's good to know," he says, less pleased than when they'd started. He can't fault her, though; it's the nature of the beast.

x

"However, your perp manipulates the men into fulfilling his fantasies without the risks inherent in committing the act himself.

"He's meticulous and detail oriented. Imagine the attention to detail it takes to manipulate one half of your victims to accept a virtually blind date and the other half to murder a virtual stranger, and then bring them to a simultaneous boil."

He'd rather not, though he must. Abby would call it 'an uncontrolled experiment with too many uncontrollable variables thrown into the mix', or some such damn thing.

It's been three days and he misses Abby.

x

"Now you say there's no activity on either web account," Isles continues, unaware of his wishes, "so if the Internet is his main resource he may not know that his plan failed and that your Corporal is still alive."

"Sometimes murders can go for days without being found out."

"Thirty two percent of deaths are discovered through putrefaction."

"Except for the computers, there's nothing to tie the perp and vic." That's really his biggest concern. Normal links with motive are useless with this random Internet thing. In a murder case you look first for those closest to the victim, or else someone who stood to gain in some way from the death. This time there is no motive and no suspect in the attacks on Tragule or Massey. If the Investigators in Maryland and DC are using traditional connection / gain motives, those attackers will never be found.

Had they been called in to solve Spencer's murder, it might take weeks or months to narrow down Hastings. Communications never went to him. He might, in fact, never have been suspected; he doesn't know the real Spencer and has no rational motive to want her dead. In fact, according to his testimony he didn't want Spen**s**er dead either. Metro needs this information on MOs to solve Tragule's murder and Massey's assault. They may have misspelled Identities such as his team has, but with no links to the attackers' computers, the search could go cold sooner than hot tea poured on a block of ice in a deep freeze.

"What really concerns me," Isles says, as if he needed new concerns, "is the interval between these assaults and the time spent in preparation, together with the increased confidence that comes with success. There are going to be more incidents. Probably many more."

xxx

"DiNozzo, anything on Tragule?" When Gibbs left with Palmer, the man had been assigned to research her murder in the Rosemary Hills section of Silver Spring, Maryland.

"You were right about the pink clothes. Crime Scene photos show everything she'd been wearing - and it was scattered all around the room where she'd been found - was in shades of pink, from light pastel upward."

"Our perp's first calling card."

"I sent word to the Lead Detective in that case, Paul Lipp, to cross check the evidence from Tragule's rape kit with that of Paula Massey and heard from him just a few minutes ago. Metro had emailed him the DNA from Paula Massey's attacker; not even close."

"What about Hastings' cheek swab?" He doubts there'll be a match, the guy's shaken up from one incident, but they have to rule him out.

"Ruby doesn't have the result yet."

He checks his watch, it's already after 1500. "Why not?"

"She just got it this morning, boss. Even Abby insists on 24 hours."

"Well, she's no Abby."

"Want me to go down there?"

Gibbs suspects he knows why Tony's volunteering to visit the girl and it has nothing to do with cracking the whip with the attractive redhead, but her report would only confirm what he already believes, that Hastings didn't do Tragule or Massey. "McGee."

"Yes?"

"The misspelled perp and victim, if they didn't come off the Dating sites, what are the chances of Police finding the real perps?"

"They're more likely to find your Puppet Master than the ones who actually did the deeds, unless _they _have records and got sloppy. Whether that happened..." he spreads his hands helplessly.

"DiNozzo, you have the Police in the Tragule and Massey cases updated; they know what to look for?"

"Done and done, boss."

He'd expected no less and returns his attention to McGee. "You got that trace on that other Haystings yet?" He'd better say yes.

"The IP addresses that the 'date seduction' messages came from were a collection of places scattered throughout the city. I'm still trying to ID most of them, but I did find one, the most recent one used when the date was confirmed by Corporal Spencer."

"Where was that bastard?"

"The 'In A Net' Café." He gives him the address on I Street NW.

"_Pew_," is the judgment that comes from his left side.

"I know, Tony," Ziva cuts in. "Your American capacity for horrendous puns never ceases to amaze me."

"Ziver, you're with me. Gear up."

"Gears meshing and ready to rev." This pulls a double take from him. "I am sorry, Tony was being factious before you came."

xxx

'In A Net' Café is little more than coffee, croissant and comp. You slide your bills into a slot slightly above your lap for brief intervals, $2 for 10 minutes, $5 for 30, $10 gets you 90 while $20 can net their perp a staggering two hours to target an unknown number of victims in near complete anonymity.

There's one counter in the middle left and seven units line the long windows on the right, all presently in use, and there's not much room for more in the long thin store. Gibbs hopes they have plenty of room for storage and more behind the faux brick wall behind the counter or that the rent is low. He leads the way to the red tee shirted woman by the register, his IDs already on display and he makes his introductions with his usual brevity.

"How may I help you?" Anne, by her nametag pinned over her left breast, asks.

"We are investigating," Ziva tells her, "activity emanating from one of your computers." She reads off an IP address from a paper containing the last exchange from Ha**y**stings to Spencer.

"That'd be number three," Anne points to a unit forward of middle at which a lanky teen is playing Tetris.

Gibbs has already found the black domed video stations in front and rear of the long public area. "We need to see your surveillance videos for the day before yesterday."

"And I need to see your Warrant."

x

What little pleasantness had been on parts of his face he allows to slough off. "Federal Agents don't need a warrant to watch a video." They may well be required to produce one, Palmer hadn't gotten the faxed papers back, but he hopes Anne can be bluffed. So long as the warrant's in Palmer's hand by the time they get back - and it'd better be if she doesn't want a dressing down for letting them go off without it, they can claim to have been covered, even if they couldn't show it in site.

Anne tries to stare him down, he's never lost a stare contest and she's not even a contender. She blinks in less than ten seconds. "What do you need to see?"

Ziva consults her paper again for the time stamped message confirming the presumed date between Haystings and Spencer. "Monday at 2037 hours."

With reluctance that can almost be felt through the air between them, Anne goes to a computer on a shelf extending from the faux brick wall and Gibbs lifts the counter divider, admitting himself and Ziva. They get close enough without crowding the woman, who had glared impotently at their invasion.

As they watch, Anne calls up a menu and inputs the date and time Ziva had given and, when [Enter] is hit the monitor shows the store from the rear, customers facing the camera. There are only two people using computers at that time and neither teenage girl is using Number Three.

x

"Try going backward," Gibbs suggests, thinking the perp might have just left. The image starts moving, proceeds faster and faster until an hour has flown by in reverse, then he directs the scan forward. Minutes flash as seconds, customers come and go until the lights go out for the night. At no time does anyone sit down at Unit Three.

"Is that the right computer?" Had their perp come and gone in the three hours they'd been watching the wrong station? Anne takes the paper from Ziva's hand.

"That's it, number Three."

"Is the clock wrong?"

"That clock is set to the Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado. It's accurate to ten to the minus nine seconds. That's one ten _billionth_ of a second."

"Back it up to the last person to use the thing."

"Yes - _sir_."

Gibbs ignores the tone and the footage flashes backward until finally a boy of about eighteen or early nineteen backs into the seat nearly three and a half hours before the message was sent. An even younger girl with him backs into station two.

This is worthless. Even if the time is right on these clocks he doesn't know if Spencer's laptop, presently secured in Evidence Lockup, has the right time and it would take McGee too long to go down, turn it on and check it. If Spencer's clock is wrong they're looking at an unknown variance; hours or possibly days of records to search through and facial recognition work on anyone who's walked in here this month.

"We'll need that computer and your Security footage."

Anne's teeth are on her lower lip, about to launch an earthy response but the fricative dies when she meets his eyes.

xx

Back in his car, he has his cell phone out and the connection rapidly made, the information almost as succinctly expressed. "How could he do it, McGee?"

/There are several ways. If he has the IP address he could route the contact through another computer, easily done if the unit's not being used. An alternative is to hack in and change the date and time, then restore when he's finished./

"Other words, we might have nothing." Nothing, that is, but a too heavy computer in the back seat. At least the Security record reduces down to a silver DVR CD.

/Not necessarily. If I can get at it, I can find out what happened./

"Have Palmer set up a Warrant for a computer. We're bringing it in."

/Will do./

x

McGee's smart enough not to point out to him - though he used to have to deal with it when Michelle Palmer was Lee - that it's usually done the other way around. Come to think of it, even Palmer hasn't been that foolish in quite a while. He checks his watch. He hates Internet crime, so few people to interview, too much investigation. No body, no weapon, rarely fingerprints from keyboards seemingly everyone in the damned city has access to, possibly the originating computer is somewhere else, maybe even in some other country... He would never head up Cyber Crime, though he could see McGee running it some day.

Tragule and Massey were attacked weeks ago and Massey's place had been consistently lived in by her roommate Debbie Maizer. Tragule's apartment was released long ago from Crime Scene status by the Maryland PD and has probably been rented out already. If he had a body, a Crime Scene other than Spencer's apartment, witnesses other than an oblivious clerk, a weapon or at least an idea of where to look for one - or Ducky or Abby to at least give him an idea what to look for...

x

"When you have that Warrant, send everyone home. In the morning you tear the innards out of this computer."

/Right, boss./

He shuts the phone on the evening.


	11. Pieces

Chapter Eleven  
Pieces

Mother Siobhan McGee, wearing a green stole over her white cinctured Alb, appropriate to the warm June evening, has just finished the Gospel reading for the nine souls gathered for Evening Prayer and Healing Service and steps out of the Sanctuary of Saint Mary the Virgin Church. She crosses the chancel and steps down to the head of the center aisle, a small bottle of sanctified oil in her hand as, two hundred feet distant, the Narthex door opens to admit a latecomer. She doesn't pay particular attention to the indistinct figure; the Nave is half lit to save power and to bring people to the front so, backlit by the stained glass windows depicting the Apostles and their modern counterparts, she can't see who's approaching.

As she opens the small bottle and the nine people begin filing out of the widely scattered pews, she smiles to see it's Timmy coming up to join the end of the line. She turns a drop of oil onto her right thumb, inscribes a cross upon the forehead of the woman first in line. "I anoint you with Oil in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen."

This she does for each person in turn and each turns and files back to his or her seat but with Timmy she lingers an extra second and then adds a pat of fingers to his cheek before he takes a place in the first pew on her left and she anoints herself and closes the bottle. "As you are outwardly anointed with this Holy Oil, so may our Heavenly Father grant you the inward anointing of the Holy Spirit. Of His great mercy may He forgive you your sins, release you from suffering and restore you to wholeness and strength. May He deliver you from all evil, preserve you in all goodness and bring you to everlasting life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

Working alone, no Acolytes being scheduled for Evening Liturgy and Healing Service, she begins the Consecration and in due time the distribution of the Eucharist, ending the Service with the admonition "This Service is now ended, your service now begins. Go forth into the world in peace. Cheer the saddened, feed the hungry, visit the lonely and the sick, and do all within your power to make this world, God's world, a better place to live." She raises her hand to the women and men, inscribing the Cross. "And may the blessing of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit rest upon you and those you love this night and forever more. Amen."

"Amen."

In time all are gone - except Timmy.

x

"Dia duit, a thaisce." Now she can give him a proper kiss with the 'hello, darling'. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" Even though his shift is _supposed _to end at 4:00, which would allow him to get here well before this Service, under Jethro's tender mercy he doesn't usually get out of NCIS in time for them to meet even after 6:00.

"I thought I might take you out to dinner."

"That'd be nice, dear." She won't mention that her car is in the lot and he'd have to either drive her back here to get it or drive her in in the morning, nor will she mention that she can plainly see that dinner's not what's on his mind.

"How was your day?" she asks as she picks up from the Credence table the tray containing the elements and paraphernalia for the Service, and he goes to open the door with the carved statue of Saint John upon it, which portal leads two steps down into the Sacristy. He lets her go first.

"It was... unprogressive," he tells her as he shuts the door and she sets the tray down by the sink.

"I'm sorry to hear that," she says, wondering if that's even a word. Well, he's the Wordsmith.

She removes the green stole, kisses the small embroidered cross in the middle and folds it up, sets it aside for return to the Vesting Room, unties the white cincture from about her waist. "Is there anything I can do?" she asks, folding and setting the long white cord beside the stole and pulling loose the Velcro holding her Alb secured at her shoulders.

"You're doing it."

She stops, looks up the three inches into his eyes and isn't sure she likes what she sees there. "Excuse me?"

"What? No. I mean just being here."

"Oh. Good thing, because I'm taking off my vestments, _not _undressing." She'd be surprised if she actually had to remind him. There's something bothering him, and he's either going to tell her what it is or he won't. She opens the white robe-like garment and slips it off from her Clerical clothes, hangs the Alb on a wide hanger, secures the Velcro attachments again, drapes the cincture over the vestment's shoulders and puts all in the closet.

"For a moment," she says, "I thought you were thinking of being bad." Perhaps this might draw him out?

She tries to make it clear that under _other _circumstances that wouldn't be unwelcome, but she's pleased he has enough sense to say "Not in here."

x

Returning her attention to the tray, she opens the small door to the piscina behind the sink, dumps the water from the lavabo bowl into that hidden sink which drains into the garden, then dries the bowl with the small white cotton towel.

"Was it really terrible?" Last evening had sounded terrible and all day long she hasn't been able to get the situation with Bob Hastings out of her mind. She sets the crystal bowl upon the tray together with a fresh towel covering it, reaches up, lifts her red hair out of the way to get at the gold stud holding the stiff white collar about her throat.

"Not all, but enough. Corporal Spencer, Margaret Tragule and another woman, Paula Massey, seem to be part of the same mess."

She has the collar free but stops from lowering it. "Three?"

"I'm scared there's more we haven't found."

She thinks she's removed the collar too early, considers putting it back on. No, best just to let him keep talking. She sets the collar down beside the tray, undoes the top button at the back of the blouse to ease pressure on her throat and begins to clean the sacred vessels before her, readying them for the next Service. She won't press him; if he wants to talk he will, and she knows him well enough to know he does want to talk, so she gives him only silence.

x

She wants to ask when she'll be able to talk to Bob Hastings but decides instead to ask this after dinner, when they're home and their food's digested. He has Enkiss rules to abide by and she has Liturgical ones, and it doesn't help that neither of them are in a position to do much else than to follow them. She washes the two small crystal cruits that had held the water and the to-be-consecrated wine, puts them and the crystal stoppers onto the tray, picks up the golden wine chalice and starts to clean it under the hot water.

"Would you talk to Robert Hastings?"

She barely tightens her grip on the tall, ornate stem in time or the valuable cup would slip out of her wet hands. She turns off the hot stream and snatches the white cotton purificator to dry the golden vessel, but only has eyes for Timmy. "What?" She sees he's very serious. "Jethro wants me to talk to a suspect?" No matter how sure she is of his innocence, just yesterday Timmy'd said–

"I haven't asked him yet."

x

She puts the dried Chalice onto the tray and the cotton cloth beside it, unsure what to say to her husband. She's known Timmy to be impetuous - her own position as Enkiss Chaplain had been cemented before he'd ever mentioned it to her - but this is too much. She puts her arms about his neck, pulls him into a loving and lingering kiss that leaves him with wonder etched on his face when she finally lets him go. Then she reaches into the cupboard before her, takes a red Book of Common Prayer off the shelf, pulls free the thin red ribbon, pages through the book and lets him see her place it at 'Ministration at the Time of Death'.

"Funny." She closes the book. "That was a 'goodbye' kiss, wasn't it?"

"It will be a beautiful Service, darling."

"I'm serious."

She puts the book, and her smile, away into the cabinet with equal force. "So am I. You know Jethro will slap your head so hard the shrapnel will cover your bullpen. Darling, what are you _thinking_?"

"He's been interrogated by Gibbs and Michelle, we don't believe he's guilty - not when this looks so big. Someone seems to be manipulating men into killing women; there are probably more than the three attacks we know about, but I think Hastings knows more than he's saying."

"So interview or interrogate him again."

"I was hoping, since you've known him for so long, that you might have some insight, some way of reaching him to get answers that'll take too long for us."

x

Slowly, straining for strict control, she turns toward the tray, gathers up all the used cloths in her left hand and squeezes them until her arm trembles. She says slowly in Gaelic strictly so he won't understand her "Athair, a thabhairt dom an neart chun seasamh in aghaidh mo neart féin os comhair mé le _baintreach_."

"What?"

She didn't want him to know, but he might as well. "I _said_ 'Father, give me the strength to resist my own strength before I'm a _widow_'." She forces the anger down, forces herself to unclench her grip until she can drop the wrinkled cloths. "Timmy." She has to work harder to force herself to wash the tightness from her body, but she doesn't turn to him until she's relaxed all the muscles of her body.

"A chuisle," she looks up the three inches to him, forces all tone from her words, "I don't know how to tell you how insulted I am," the fire rises again and she can't quench it, "or how angry I am that you could think to use me as an Interrogator instead of as a Priest. _Do you know me so little_?"

"Huh?" He actually looks surprised. "I didn't say that."

"Then _what _did you want me to say to him? Did you think I wouldn't treat _any _conversation we'd have as privileged?" She can't stop herself from stepping into him, can't keep the anger from burning through. "Did you think I would get him to confess to anything and not treat it as a Sacramental _Confession_? Did you think I would _allow_ you to _Record _our conversation?"

"NO!"

"Then what _were _you thinking?"

x

He backs away but the wall's behind him. He slumps in defeat. "I guess I wasn't. It all made sense in the car and out there," he gestures to the door back to the Church.

She doesn't want to fight. They've never _had _a fight - never mind last Sunday at the Convention - and this won't be their first. "Darling, I thought we were always clear on this. I'm not Enkiss. I'm a Priest first, a wife second and an Enkiss employee ninth. In most things my priorities are not going to be the same as any of yours. You and your people care about solving the crime, helping the victim and catching and punishing the bad guy. My priorities are helping the victim and all of you and trying to _redeem _the bad guy.

"You all use Science and Investigation and Forensics and the Law to achieve your aim. I use Faith and God's Word and Grace to achieve what God wants me to do, so in any conflict it's God's law that wins, not man's. When it comes to a conflict between man's law and what I am Called to do I will stand and slug it out with Jennifer, Jethro _or _you to do what I believe I must."

She reaches into her back left pocket and pulls out her small leather ID case. "And if ever the day comes when one of you backs me into a corner and tries to force me to apply any form of man's law against anyone _instead _of God's Law _for _them, then you can have this back."

x

He takes the shield case from her but hugs her, and in that hug pushes the black folder back into her rear pocket. "I'm sorry."

Held close to him, she only wants to say "I forgive you." She can relax now. Finally. The longer he holds her the further the fire is from her and she can really relax.

"A wife only second?"

She shakes her head, unable not to smile. "Timmy, you are an idiot."

"That's why you married me."

She lifts up to his lips. "You're right."

x

After a minute, she pushes his chest and returns to her work in silence. The purificator and other white cloths must be laundered and ironed before their next use, so she sets them aside. She pulls from a drawer below the shelf a fresh white purificator and puts it on top of the empty chalice and sets the gold paten upon that. Then she takes from a box in the cabinet before her a large Eucharist, the priest's host, and sets it upon the paten. Next she covers all with a pall, a white cloth-covered square of stiff cardboard, and upon that goes a green chalice veil.

Finally, into the green burse, two connected square pieces, she puts the corporal, the larger white cloth that becomes the setting for the Eucharist. Beside this set she puts the washed cruets, places upon them the crystal stoppers, then she starts for the rear door, but pauses. "Cara, I do need a favor."

He looks like he's just glad she's no longer mad at him. "Anything."  
"Would you be a dear and arrange for me to talk to Bob Hastings?"

x

She leaves without his answer. It's not the first time that he's looked at her as though wondering what's happened. His expression is always fun to see.

The sense of mystery is never going to go out of their marriage if she can help it.

x

She closes the door behind her and, in the hall, descends the two steps and enters the second door on her right, the office she shares with George Donaldson, shuts the door, crosses to her desk and picks up the phone receiver. She doesn't have to look up the cell number, nor wait more than three rings.

"Jenn, Siobhan, I need you to clear me to meet with Bob Hastings." Perhaps it's Jethro's influence that the three of them rarely get into small talk when dealing with Enkiss matters.

/Hastings is in Protective Custody as a Material Witness in a crime./

"I don't mean as an NCIS employee. This is as Curate of Saint Mary's to one of our Eucharistic Ministers."

She doesn't hold her breath, just waits, hoping Jennifer can see the distinction as she sees it.

/I'll have him brought to the Conference Room in the morning, ten to eleven./

As Jennifer had heard her, so she hears the Director. Bob's being protected, so moving him out of the secret place to Enkiss HQ and back again is a risk. Jenn will only allow an hour and that doesn't mean sixty-one minutes. "Thank you."

/Let's not make this a habit./ The line goes dead before she can answer.

Maybe Jethro is more of an influence on them than she'd realized.

As she turns back to the door, she can't help but see the framed portrait photo to the right of the door; Saint Mary's three Eucharistic Ministers, all clothed in white Albs, cinctures and silver crosses on glittering chains. Left is Christina Dumas, dead this past year; right is Melanie Velez, so dark her visage is almost stunning in the white vestment and grey/blue background; and in the center the taller Robert Hastings.

She hopes another Minister will not be lost.

xxx

Tony DiNozzo always considers Fridays mornings to be the worst because cases that last all week without progress usually mean he shouldn't make plans for Saturday - really a bad thing because Jeanne already has. He tosses his backpack behind his desk and goes around to his seat, determined to get a jump on his partners who haven't come down yet from breakfast. He pulls his holster and shield from his belt, opens his desk drawer and stows them in the otherwise empty compartment. Maybe if he's very lucky he can uncover some royal clue that will magically make everything about this case make sense before he has to hear Gibbs say

"What've you got, DiNozzo?" the man asks as he enters from the other end of the bullpen and settles into his seat.

"Ah - ha," he tries to put his confident face on but it doesn't fit this morning, yet he wags his finger at the man as though it did. "Some day I'm going to beat you in here."

"Have to start yesterday morning," Gibbs says, typing on his keyboard, eyes on his screen.

"Wait, you were here all night?" He looks showered and rested and the clothes look new, but maybe the boss has an entire Sears outlet in some obscure cubbyhole of the building.

"You didn't answer my question."

"Question. Question. Yes. Sorry boss, nothing new." His phone rings. "Ah! Maybe something new." He can't get that lucky; this morning they're going over the clues again and McTimepiece is going out soon with Sabrina the not-so-teenage Witch to meet with Paula Massey in the hope of getting more clues to her on-line conversations, not with her assailant (there had been none) but with the Puppet Master.

"Very Special Agent DiNozzo, what can I do about you? Hey, hi Marcato." He listens for a moment. "You gotta be freaking _kidding _me!"

x

He sees his exclamation has attracted Gibbs attention. It probably turned heads two bullpens away. "Hang on a sec." He hits the red button. "You're not gonna believe this. Seaman Recruit Julia Hennessy was supposed to deploy for her first tour aboard the USS Port Royal, CG-73 out of Norfolk at 0700 and didn't show. They just found her bludgeoned to death in her house in Ivor, Virginia."

As Gibbs takes the call, asking only a one word question, Tony snatches his backpack from the floor and pulls his desk drawer back open. Less than fifteen seconds later they're at the elevator. When it opens Ziva, Michelle and Tim, fresh from breakfast and ready to start the day, are about to step out. Gibbs and DiNozzo each grab arms as they board and back the agents aboard.


	12. Hard Answers

Chapter Twelve  
Hard Answers

At 0830, an unconscionably early hour to start a day though she knows everyone else has had a much earlier start than she, Reverend Siobhan McGee, clad in her working uniform of black skirt and white collared blue blouse, waits in NCIS' Conference Room. The door opens and Agent Peter Collins escorts Bob Hastings into the room. She reads apprehension on the young man's face but it morphs into shock and then utter distress when he sees her. He halts and it seems for a moment that Collins would have to drag him into the room.

She's not used to Bob reacting in this way to her and decides she'd best gain control of the moment. "Thank you, Peter. Would you please excuse us?"

He looks like he wants to refuse, but does not. "Yes, Pastor. The Director said I'm to collect him in an hour."

"That will be fine." When the man is gone, Hastings still hasn't moved. "Good morning, Bob."

"What's good about it?"

She opens her hands in an admissive gesture. "Fair enough. How have you been?"

"Why are you here?"

"Just to talk." She reads his answer in his eyes. They rarely have any difficulty with this, but today's situation is far from the usual. "I figured by this point you'd want someone to talk to."

"I'm not admitting anything. I didn't _do_ anything and if you're here to interrogate–"

"No. This is not an interrogation, I don't do that, and Director Shepherd has promised there'll be no record of this conversation. We're as alone as if we were in my office." No answer. "Would you like to sit down?"

x

"Why are you here?"

"If you prefer, I could ask Father Donaldson, or would you prefer someone else? I would prefer to keep this just between us, but if you wish to speak to someone else I can arrange it."

"Does Father Donaldson know?"

"He knows–"

"Then this isn't just between us."

"If I may _finish_. He knows there's a problem, and that I'm handling it, but presently that's all he knows, because I don't know all that much more."

"Your husband–"

"Is a Federal Agent and he has his responsibilities and I have mine, and in this case I assure you they do not overlap. He's investigating a case of NCIS' own. I am a Priest, the Curate of Saint Mary the Virgin Church and you are our Eucharistic Minister. Believe me when I tell you that I'm on your side."

"If so, you're the only one here that is."

x

She leans forward, fixing him with a look both firm and assuring. "If so?"

This breaks his eye contact. "I'm sorry."

"Bob, I'm on your side but there are some things you have to know. First, I can't make you talk to me but we have 60 minutes and we've already used some of them just getting to this point. You have the opportunity to talk freely to me. I think you should, and I promise you that whatever we say is confidential." Finally he does look at her. "Would you like to sit down?"

This time he does pull out a chair, the furthest one along the long side from her, sits and places his hands flat on the table, looking straight ahead at the wall.

It's a long moment of tense silence before he says to the wall "Am I through?"

"No." This does get him to look right. "That is by no means certain. I won't lie to you, I am legally bound to tell Father Donaldson _something_, and where things go depends upon Clerical Law, but at the moment you are not charged with anything." She doesn't want to say this next, but she must.

"I must ask you, however, not to Serve at the Altar or perform any of your other duties until this is resolved."

"_Why_?"

x

A harder question than most people would realize, and the answer is no more pleasant. She folds her hands before her, steels herself for the unpleasant truth. She's glad when he does turn his chair to face her, even though it makes the answer no less difficult.

"Bob, any time a Priest or Minister, regardless of rank, comes under suspicion or accusation, founded or not, this is something we each face. We cannot perform our functions otherwise. Anyone in a situation such as yours, anyone brought under accusation of doing _anything,_ must step down until the charges have been investigated and either confirmed or dismissed."

"But I'm not _charged_ with _anything_!"

She tightens her grip on her hands. If what Timmy has told her…. She forces herself to ease her grip, to ease her muscles in hands, arms and shoulders, even if she can't prevent him from seeing it.

"Bob, could we be adult about this?"

"I _am_ being adult."

She holds back the sigh that would make her feel a little better. "Bob, if we had several hours I would devote some of them to this issue, but we don't. I _have_ to ask you to voluntarily step aside – for the time being."

"And if I don't?"

This time she can't contain the sigh. "Bob, you already have. For your sake I'm going to tell Father Donaldson that you volunteered, because if you do not I will be forced to tell him more detail and he'll be forced to suspend you from duty."

"Then everyone will know!"

"No. No one will know. He and I will be the only ones who know why you're not Serving. No one in the Congregation knows or will know, not unless you volunteer the information. You may put whatever face upon this that you wish, but you _are _suspended from Serving."

He leaves his chair, steps away, but there's no place to go.

"So that's it," he says to the wall. "Sentenced and condemned for being accused of something, not even tried, just executed."

x

She uses the moments while his back is turned to pray for patience, for wisdom to know the right words to say. "Bob." When he turns expectantly she still doesn't have them. "If I were just here to tell you the standard policy of the Episcopal Church I could have sent you a note–"

"Have _you_ ever been suspended for doing something wrong?"

"None of your business." This moment is slipping out of control. "Bob, I came here to help you. I'm not here to interrogate you, I don't even care what you're accused of, that's for them," she glances at the wall to the rest of the building, "to worry about. I thought you would want to talk to someone who's on your side, someone who'll keep your secrets."

"You're not keeping very many so far. I mean, this isn't _fair_. They accuse me of things and lock me up, you suspend me–"

She raises her hand and gets his silence. "Bob." She does get his silence, at least for the moment. "This isn't like you."

"How would you know? We've known each other for, what, three something years? I was there before you. You don't know me. Your husband doesn't know me. People accuse me of things and no one knows me. No one cares about my side. No one's fair–"

"_Stop_!" Her palm on the desk reverberates like a gunshot.

x

When she has his silence again, this time surprised silence, she fights again for calm tones. "Bob, I hear your pain. I know you're frustrated. But perhaps you've forgotten how many people are on your side. I was never off it. I arranged this hour because I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk completely off the record but if you really want to drive me away I'll go." He's still quiet. "Is that what you want?"

"No." Small, but something.

"Then what do you want?"

"I want out of here. I want my life back. I want my job at the Church back. I want to have this garbage not to have happened! I was _hacked_, for God's sake. I was set up and I just thought I was going out on a date – how was I to know some bastard was using my name?"

x

"That's it? You were just going out on a date?"

"That's all! A _date_. I never knew what _someone else_ was doing in my name!"

This is considerably less than Timmy revealed and she's sure she's getting the sanitized version. She doesn't want it.

"So that was it? You were going to, what, take her out for dinner and a movie?"

"_Yes_."

"And after the movie?"

"I don't know. I figured I'd see where things went."

"And you had no other plans?"

"Not really."

"I see." She looks at the clock on the wall. Has it really only been less than fifteen minutes? She sits back, and this time the deep sigh leaves her drained. "Is there anything more?" He shakes his head. "All right." She reaches for her black purse on the table beside her, then changes her mind and releases it. "I do have three last questions," she says, sitting back.

"Yes?"

"No, actually just one last one. You already _know_ I'm married to an NCIS Special Agent and that I'm the Chaplain here and privy to all sorts of Confidential information so my question is:" she meets his eyes solidly, "When did you decide I was stupid?"

x

"What?"

"Kindly knock it off. I was on the verge of walking out of here and leaving you to Father Donaldson or the Archdeacon but I chose to change my mind. Now I was honest with you, I'm here on your side to give you a chance and I hoped to show you some support - so since I am here to help you, you will not treat me like an idiot."

"I wasn't–"

"Look at me and listen carefully because I'm going to tell you this _once_." She can't remember the last time she's spoken so firmly to a member of her congregation, and others have made her angrier, though rarely over something so important. "I fought hard to get us this hour, I bucked people all the way up the line because I feel you're worth it. I am on your side, but if you lie to me one more time I am going to leave you to the Diocese to contend with. Am I understood?"

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not looking for sorry. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Good."

x

She settles back in the chair, pushes out the anger. It's no easy task. "Now, let's start from the beginning." She sees he doesn't want to do this, but he eventually sits down. "What happened?"

For several seconds he doesn't look at her. When he does, the first thing he asks is "Is this suspension going to be long?"

"I don't know. So long as it takes for you to be cleared."

"I don't even know what I'm to be cleared _of_. There _are_ no charges. They're keeping me here for my 'protection'. I don't even know what I'm being protected from. They say they called my job at the airport, and that I won't get into trouble for missing work, but I don't even have an answer. Meantime… meantime your husband has been looking through my personal files on my computer and they're personal. No one's supposed to read them or look at them!"

"What kind of files?"

His eyes reflect his troubled thoughts. "Do I have to tell you?"

"No, you don't have to if you don't want to."

"I don't want to."

"All right." There's little point in this anyway, Timmy has already told her about the damning images and videos. They went a long way toward her decision to suspend him and eventually he's going to realize that, but she's not going to kick him when he's this far down.

Truth be told, she's very uncomfortable about the prospect of ever Serving in the Sanctuary with him again, but she'll leave that for another time and definitely for George to decide. But she needs Sacramental Seal of her own to discuss something like this, her discomfort at his future presence beside her at the Altar. She has things she has to say, concerns she has to deal with if they're going to work together, and in all fairness she cannot recommend his dismissal. 'This I need to discuss with Mother Anne.' She and Anne Kaufmann are mutual Confessors. 'I'll call her later.'

x

"I just feel like no one is ever going to forgive me if they find out, and I'm so scared they'll find out. Everyone in the building knows."

"Hardly everyone."

"Everyone."

"You'd be amazed how compartmentalized these people are. They practically invented the 'Need to Know' rule.

"You know."

"Bits and pieces." 'And more than enough.'

"_You'll_ never like me again."

x

There it is, her own failing she'll do anything not to fall over. Can she distance herself from mutual service because of what's in his head? In the three years she's known him she's never heard a word said against him. Yet when Timmy told her, all she could flash back to was Charlie Morley, and if any comparison was unfair...

"Robert, do you know Jeremiah Chapter 3, verse 13?"

He thinks about it for a moment. "No." He looks away. "I guess you think that makes me a bad person. Don't even know the whole Bible."

"Hardly. Anyway, Jeremiah 3:13 contains a promise from God: 'I have loved you with an everlasting love.' Humans may change their feelings, fall into and out of love far more often than they should, but God's promise is of Everlasting Love, and since He is eternal and all Loving that is literally true. Friends may come and go, love may blossom and whither, but God's love is everlasting and that is one thing you may be absolutely confident of. You can do nothing, say nothing, _be_ nothing that will make Him love you any less than He ever has. And He expects no more of us than He would give Himself, therefore He sets that as the goal we should all strive for. This means forgiveness, caring, abiding with one another. This thing you are going through now, it will test you for a time, but you will come through it and the people that care about you, that love you, will be beside you."

x

When he turns back, humiliation and grief are chiseled into his face. "I've done something terrible," he forces through tight throat, through lips that won't let him say it.  
"I couldn't help myself." He squeezes his eyes shut but the tears slip out. His voice is hushed, the words forced out in broken sentences. "I've tried to stop myself; I don't know _how_. I'm so scared. I can't turn to anyone, can't ask for help because I can't let anyone know or they'll destroy me. They'll tell everyone, my reputation will be ruined, my life will be destroyed and they'll have fun doing it. No one can know but it hurts too much to keep it in any longer."

"I will never tell."

"Yes you will. If you find out, you'll hate me forever."

x

"Robert." He can't look up to her. "I will never tell. I can't. What's said in here is as if we were in the Confessional." Saint Mary the Virgin, being a former Roman structure, still retains the old booths on the Gospel side of the Nave. But he shakes his head, unwilling, unable to tell her.

Looking upward, she prays for wisdom, prays to know what to do. When she looks down again at the huddled young man, she knows.

"I know about the pictures, about the videos." He looks up, grief and pain are crowded aside by shock. "They are not going to define our relationship or our days together. I promise."

Again that looking down, that shaking of his head, that denial that there can be forgiveness. He's so agonized that he can't break through.

x

What she decides to do she would normally do at an end, but he's not going to make it through to that end as he is now.

She pushes her chair back, approaches and stands beside him, but he won't look up, so she places her hands upon his bowed head. He actually flinches under her hands, but she puts that aside.

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, who has left power to His Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive you all your offences; and by His authority committed to me, I absolve you from all your sins, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."

x

When she withdraws her hands he looks up to her, but this time shock and grief and pain make room for hope. She goes to the door, grasps the deadbolt latch, very firmly twists it and the snap flares through the room. Then she steps back and sits down, but in a chair beside him. She knows she promised Jennifer Shepherd that she would limit herself to an hour, too much of which is gone, but NCIS may have her Eucharistic Minister back when she is done.


	13. Victim of the Puppet Master

Chapter Thirteen  
Victim of the Puppet Master

Two Navy cars turned into the sidewalk on either side of 647 Babb Drive in Ivor, Virginia mark the perimeter of the secured area, and four uniformed Petty Officers reinforce the message to the community of the curious that no one not Navy is welcome. Gibbs, with Ziva riding shotgun, puts his yellow and black Hemi into the curb almost to the forward car's bumper to leave enough room for the white over black MCRT truck, if not for the eventual arrival of the ME truck.

Getting out, Gibbs wishes it were Ducky on the way but he reminds himself Mallard chose Maura Isles to sub for him because he trusts the Boston ME. It could be worse; Jimmy Palmer could be substituted for during this week by Sammy Sky.

But even before his team has the truck unpacked of necessary gear, the ME truck slides into the space behind the rear vehicle. Apparently Palmer can navigate outside DC even if he can't within the city.

Michelle pauses, camera bag over one shoulder but her eyes catch his and she doesn't attempt to join her husband - yet.

The doors open and Maura Isles alights from the cab. She'd driven, another down stroke to Palmer if the Boston woman can find her way about better than he can; but when Gibbs sees the light brown haired Kate Todd clone he decides the day can't get much worse.

Ducky never showed up to a Crime Scene in a short, blazing red dress that hugged too many assets. When, a moment later, he realizes the absurdity of the thought, not to mention the horror of the image presented, he decides that staying up all night examining evidence and reviewing details of the case hasn't been at all beneficial.

x

He decides to push the whole issue deep underground and walks up the sidewalk to the four Petty Officers stationed near the north side car. He doesn't ignore the two Twos or the remaining Three, but his focus is first on the three striped First Class up front.

He has his ID case out, a courtesy; the men already display their bona fides in their white uniforms.

Petty Officer Fletcher, ID easily read from seven feet distant before he arrived, speaks for his team. "The XO ordered us to come out from the Port Royal to see why Seaman Recruit Hennessy didn't report. We got here a little after 0735. At first we thought we had a UA on our hands, some people Enlist and then chicken out on Deploy Day, but when we got here her front door wasn't locked, just closed. We opened it, looked inside. It certainly wasn't a UA case."

Gibbs looks at the one story structure. "Nice place for a Seaman Recruit."

"Neighbor next door," he glances in the indicated direction, left beyond the line of low, manicured shrubs at the nearly identical house, white instead of blue, "says the parents are away for the month. They've been gone for two weeks. Hennessy was supposed to lock up this morning before coming to Norfolk."

When Gibbs glances back to 647, Drs. Isles and Palmer wait by the front door with the rest of his team. "All right, Petty Officers, keep the tourists away."

"Will do, sir," Fletcher says to his back as he walks toward the fourth crime scene in this burgeoning case. This is starting to remind him of their previous case, where bodies were turning up faster than they could investigate.

x

When Gibbs opens the door for his team and the Examiners, the word 'bloodbath' comes instantly to mind. The spacious living room with its two reclining chairs and paired coffee tables all face a large screen television at the window which looks out to the street are spattered with blood. It covers the nude body which lies on her back in the room's center. Darkened blood has pooled about the upper half of the young woman's torso.

The room is littered with pink; pink skirt lies beyond one coffee table, pink shirt – a closer look shows it's now almost buttonless – lies across the room. A pink bra hangs off the television by the front window, ripped pink panties lay in a corner, all as though the woman's clothes had been ripped from her and tossed to land where they would.

In life Julia Hennessy had been a quite attractive blonde of, he estimates, about five ten, Abby's height when she's not on her elevator boots, but there the resemblance ends. The young woman is slim, not 'generously endowed', but she's a battered mass of lacerations and bruises staring blindly at the blood spattered white ceiling.

Her head is distorted by undoubtedly a myriad of impacts that make her face hard to look at for long.

x

Isles and Palmer crouch carefully on the balls of their feet, and how Isles does this in scarlet high heeled shoes Gibbs doesn't care to know. The scarlet dress she wears is much too unfortunate, but he pushes back all perception of the clone and sees that his team has set upon their respective tasks.

Michelle sets a series of black on yellow triangular numbered signs adjacent to the most notable evidence, more to be determined later, while Ziva prepares the oversize digital camera. This one is still the most useful tool rather than an equally serviceable mini-unit because of the number of light filters that can be attached.

Taking one corner of the living room, David begins a series of panoramic shots while Michelle keeps a meticulous log of every exposure, noting time, angle, shutter speed, filter and other details on each numbered picture taken. When this panorama is complete, they'll repeat the process from the opposite corner before commencing an ever tightening orbit that will end with extreme close-ups of every portion of the nude woman's body.

In the meantime Tony uses an extendable metallic 'tape' measure to precisely establish the measurements of the room and of the body from fixed points, together with the locations and orientations of all furniture in relation to those points.

Then he'll be able to start a meticulous sketch of the room and body, using the collected measurements to get a precise fix on the body in details that film cannot capture.

In the meantime Gibbs and McGee conduct a minute inspection of the room, walking in tandem along a grid that will cover every inch of space. Wherever one of them finds anything of note, however small, they call Michelle to mark the spot with a numbered black on yellow triangular stand.

Due to the number of details each of the agents must note and record while functioning as a cohesive unit, Isles and Palmer are ready with their initial report well before Gibbs is prepared to hear it.

x

"Cause of Death is, as I'm sure won't surprise you, blunt force trauma to the head, torso - well, to every part of her body," the woman says, continuing to crouch beside the blonde woman's body so she can point out the distinctions.

"Notice here the bruising to her torso and forearms, her arms were quite probably raised in defensive position to ward off many of the blows."

"What did the perp use?"

"I'm not ready to say until I get her on the table and–"

"Try."

"Well, if you force me to _guess_, and bear in mind it's just a guess, I'd say it would not be inconsistent with a baseball bat, but that's just a–"

"A guess." It also corresponds to his, and to Isles' earlier report when she'd profiled the victim. Thus far, in all four cases, only Robert Hastings hadn't brought a bat. There had been one metal bat, two wooden. He looks forward to finding out the relevance of this distinction.

x

"There are two classes of wound, one not as severe, such as on her forearms, as though she were being struck without the impact points being backed up, indicating she had some freedom of movement. These, as you see here and here, were inflicted ante mortem and resulted in marked bruising and broken bones. The left temporal bone of her skull is caved in, as is the occipital. I'd say the other blows, while she was probably down on the floor, were likely delivered about fifteen to twenty minutes before her heart stopped, though the bruises would have continued to develop much as a slide of Polaroid film would. These others," she focuses more on the head and torso, "were delivered perimortem and are much more devastating; broken or shattered bones and the like I could feel under her skin. I'd say they were delivered right here while she was laying on the floor."

"About fifteen to twenty minutes between beatings."

"_And before you ask_; yes, we found indications of sexual activity. There's bruising about the crotch, blood; you _get _the picture." He hardly has to with the woman laying right in front of him. He's seen fatal beatings, far too many, but this is among the worst.

"I may be able to get you a DNA sample for Miss Rae to test." It's the only time Gibbs hears any satisfaction in her tone, and it's sharp enough to draw blood.

x

"How long ago did she die, doc?"

"Between the degree of fixed lividity in the back, arms and legs, the tide of rigor and the separation of blood and serum," she says, looking at the blood sitting atop the carpet rather than being fully soaked in, "I'd say between eight and eleven last night."

"No," Jimmy says from down near the woman's bare feet. "Eight fourteen."

Gibbs and Isles look to the Journeyman ME and he's not sure which of them is more put out at the interruption. Isles is faster, however. "Excuse me?"

"I'm sorry, usually I wouldn't interrupt," Gibbs isn't sure Isles believes this, while he knows better, "but Ducky - Doctor Mallard – and 'Chelle – teach me to look beyond the medical evidence." He points upward to the woman's left wrist and the thin gold band around it.

Gibbs leans closer to examine the shattered crystal and the small, pulverized watch face. "Eight fourteen."

x

"That's consistent with what I've got," McGee announces from a small computer workstation in the room's far left corner.

Gibbs starts over to the metal framework but stops as Ziva and Michelle approach from his left. "You two done?"

"Sixty four establishing shots," Ziva reports, "and ready for close examination of the body." The MEs move away at this broad hint to allow the women to work, though Gibbs notices his Palmer doesn't do so without a look to her husband.

Ziva gets within inches of the dead woman's battered and bloody flesh and as she shoots she calls out details for Michelle's record.

Gibbs takes a moment to view the room as a whole before continuing over to where McGee waits. "What've you got?"

"The Yahoo email account is still open." Gibbs sees a blank white page below headers and icons. "Hennessy had been replying to an email from Big Rich Rescato but the message wasn't complete and never sent. It cuts off halfway through a word."

"Probably 'cause the doorbell rang."

"She ends with saying she can't wait until he gets. That's it."

"You got the guy she's communicating with?"

"Sorry, boss, messages are routed to an email address on the company's Server, then the message is forwarded to the client's email. Unless they exchange direct contacts, there's no way to–"

"So you're saying we need a warrant for your megabyte stuff."

"Well, yes, but–"

"Palmer."

Jimmy turns from his preparation of the body bag. "Yes?"

Gibbs spares him a half-second glower. "Not you, the pretty one."

"Oh."

"Yes, sir?" Michelle asks around a grin.

"Warrant for the bytes."

"Yes, sir." She smiles to Jimmy, who still seems stung, or perhaps he's wondering if a sexual impropriety accusation is survivable.

x

"McGee, bag and tag." He won't ask how McGee will preserve an unsent message in the computer's memory once the plug is pulled. That's his problem.

He turns back to the body. According to the email, Hennessy had been looking forward to her date before shipping out on the USS Port Royal to start her Naval Career. However long or short it might have been, she didn't deserve to have it cut short so brutally, an anticipated encounter turned into a nightmare of beating, rape and bludgeoning.

"Boss, have a look at this," DiNozzo calls his attention to the doorway between living room and kitchen. When he steps into the smaller room and looks at the generally white refrigerator he decides he or one of his team has lived at least a good week.

The killer had apparently come in here, they'll find out later what for, but he'd placed his bloodied left hand upon the side of the door, not immediately visible from the front, and left, in distinct detail, the best hand and fingerprints Gibbs has seen at a Crime Scene in much too long. "I love the stupid ones."


	14. Will all of you witnessing?

Chapter Fourteen  
Will all of you witnessing…?

When Siobhan McGee gave up Robert Hastings to Special Agent Collins forty five minutes after the agreed upon time, that worthy told her that Jennifer Shepherd is waiting to see her. Thus a few minutes later, she pushes open the outer door to the Director's offices. Cynthia Sumner, phone receiver to her ear, excuses herself to the caller, puts that person on hold and presses the Intercom button. "Director, Reverend McGee is here."

/Send her in./

There's a distinct dearth of warmth in the Director's tone and Sumner gives her a sympathetic shrug.

"Thank you." She'd expected she'd have to 'face the music'; she just hadn't expected the tune to start so soon.

x

When she opens the door, she imagines she can feel the air is some ten degrees cooler in here and it has nothing to do with the air conditioner. Perhaps it's because she's normally seated opposite the woman for their usually somewhat lengthy conferences, but the chair she'd use is tucked away beyond the coffee table and small couch.

Shepherd is distinct if broad in her use of symbolism.

She shuts the door. "You wanted to see me, Director?" she inquires neutrally.

"Yes, I did, Reverend."

'Oh oh' Siobhan thinks as she approaches the desk, her face set in a placid mask.

"I notice that the camera and audio to the Conference Room had been turned off from eight thirty until just a few moments ago."

"Yes." She's mildly surprised by this opening. "That was our agreement."

"Yes, agreement. Agreement. I thought I recalled it was a two-part agreement."

"Yes, it was."

"Well, perhaps my clock had been wrong?"

The shift of her eyes causes Siobhan to glance there as well, but the digital timepiece displays the correct number. "No, it's not."

"You see, Reverend, I'm trying to get an idea where you stand and where I stand on the subjects of agreements and many more things. At this moment I find it less likely that you are married to Special Agent McGee than to Special Agent Gibbs."

x

Siobhan, unsure how to answer that quasi-insulting reference, decides that the best answer is none, and Shepherd isn't finished.

"You have, over the past near year, proven yourself to be very valuable to this Agency and its personnel, but you enjoy a unique position, that of being an NCIS employee privy to information that even _I_ am not privy to while _not_ being a sworn NCIS Agent strictly subject to the Chain of Command. I'm suddenly concerned, however, that you might be enjoying your position a little too much."

"Ma'am?" Again, the safest answer is no answer - at least until she can feel out where this conversation is going.

"A Chaplain enjoys a unique degree of autonomy and discretion, some might say secrecy. I probably receive less than a third of the reports from you that I would from any Agent, maybe a quarter is more accurate. You and now Chaplain Grant are Confessor and Counselor to every man and women in this Division, and in truth I don't want to learn some of what you know. You keep even my secrets and I would never intrude on anyone else's beyond the extent at which it affects their job performance or their ability to function as Agents."

"Yes." Again, short and direct answers are the safest, and she feels more and more the need for safety.

John Grant had come on part-time, as she is, several weeks ago when it was recognized that the need for a Chaplain to service NCIS agents had grown beyond her ability to fulfill. But the positions they occupy are quite unusual for any Agency that operates under a Chain of Command, and she has the feeling that chain is about to kink up and sting.

"However," Shepherd continues, "to date we've had an understanding between us. _I _am the Director of NCIS and when I give an order to you and to other Agents I will have it obeyed. Is there any way in which we are not clear on this?"

"No, Director."

x

Shepherd rises and comes around the desk, continues to the couch at the right side of the room and sits down, not openly inviting but leaving plenty of room. Siobhan, deciding that this signals a new phase in their conversation - after this redefining of their relationship - follows and sits down beside her.

She feels like she's averted disaster by a very slim margin, and has no desire to jeopardize this phase of their relationship by saying anything - at least until it's safe to do so.

"Now to something you _have _reported on," Shepherd says. "You've recommended a _month's _paid Leave of Absence for Mr. and Mrs. Palmer."

"Yes." She knows she can't leave the answer at that, yet even after this 'call to the carpet' they both have their positions they have to balance, and it's beginning to feel like waltzing to the Beatles. "Michelle approached me a few weeks ago and I've arranged for them to spend a month at the Franciscan Retreat House in West Virginia."

"I see." Siobhan wonders just how much Shepherd does see and how much is the waltz. "And when is this 'Spiritual Retreat' to start?"

"As soon as you sign the Order."

Shepherd's surprise flashes on her face. "I've never given an Order for a couple to take a Vacation, though I confess I think it's a good idea - though not to NCIS' Director. What's involved in this?"

Siobhan notices that she doesn't ask if it's necessary. Their to-date level of trust seems to have been reconstituted. "It's a Monastic life. They'll each have a single room, they'll follow the Monastic discipline; up at 6:00 for Morning Prayer followed by breakfast, then such duties as they're assigned. A bell in the garden, rung from a rope from the Chapel, calls everyone to Services. Meals are taken with the Community. Noontime Service with Eucharist begins the afternoon, while Evening Prayer at 5:00 and Eucharist at 6:00 followed by dinner, then Compline at 8:00 conclude the day. Otherwise, their days are their own. Evenings are set aside for contemplation or discussion, and they'll retire at 10:00."

"You must love that life."

"I do," she admits to Shepherd's non-question, "though I rarely get more than two or three days every few months to get back with friends and recharge my batteries in the woods. They'll have a month." She can't keep a wistful tone from her voice; Junes are so lovely there.

"I hope they enjoy it as much."

"It'll be a great period of contemplation and centering, with few distractions.

"They'll have no cell phone, no walkman or Ipod, no computer nor any electronic device whatsoever. Therapeutic Counseling is available, but Communication between them is stressed; and without personal distractions or contact with the outside world they'll have little to do _but _talk."

"No outside contact at all?"

"It's discouraged, though not forbidden. There's a phone to the Abbot's office, but after nightfall that message might not even be checked until dawn."

"And you consider this necessary?"

It's clear Jennifer has her doubts, but "Michelle does. Neither of them have expressed James' opinion on it."

"If he even knows."

Siobhan's sure Jennifer had meant it factiously, but she can only shrug, which doesn't seem to improve the woman's confidence.

x

"You realize if I let them go now, it's going to put a strain on NCIS' resources. Abby is in Louisiana and I understand this Ruby Rae is barely holding her own. Ducky is still in Scotland for more than a week more but, while I have confidence in Dr. Isles' abilities, if I let the Palmers go too that will not only bite into Gibbs' team's effectiveness but Autopsy's."

"Jennifer, Jethro is the only one of four daytime Team Leaders with a five person team, but you can also bring Samantha Sky in to cover for James. As an MD - trained by Ducky no less - she's competent to take up the slack for the few days until Ducky returns."

"I shudder to think of Isles and Sky together in Autopsy for a week."

"I think Doctor Isles would consider it 'a fascinating study in human interaction'."

"You realize this will leave the Science and Pathology Divisions staffed entirely by non-NCIS employees." Siobhan keeps her silence. "You don't _care_, do you?"

Faced with a direct yes or no question, she can only answer: "No, I don't."

"It's not your problem?"

"That's not it at all. I just consider Michelle and James, and trying to save their marriage, to be more important."

x

"Do you really believe their marriage is in jeopardy?"

"Don't you? Their marriage was rushed, neither was ready; that was obvious from well before they wed. Michelle didn't want to get married until last month, not way back last year. But the first few weeks of married bliss has vanished.

"James has been suffering with catastrophic nightmares and is torn apart by guilt ever since he killed George Franklin and Michelle has pushed back her own torments and grief in order to help him. But she'd been gang raped and tortured, exposed before Timmy and unable to fight back. Yet though she's talked to me and to Dr. Gyves she hasn't talked to James. Not successfully.

"Then she nearly died on two occasions, once by suffocation and once by heat prostration, and neither time has she been able to cleanse herself of the trauma. When she and Timmy were trapped in that sauna and almost died from the heat James' fears led to the most atrocious reaction, because jealousy over her undress before Timmy was his first reaction when what she truly needed at that moment was his comfort.

"James, knowing what he'd done, is racked by more guilt over that, but fear of losing her manifested itself in jealousy instead of the normal loving outreach and he's more guilt ridden because he couldn't help himself.

"Then Michelle, and all of us, was brutally tortured by those fake pictures, and it drove a wedge of distrust between the women and men of NCIS despite everyone's best efforts. James' reaction was anger against those men who faked the pictures, where Michelle wanted to be the one to vent, and to be held while she cried.

"They don't even argue, just endure in silence while they try to communicate.

"Now James is torn by guilt while Michelle, without the true outlet that comes through his being a husband she can approach for comfort in the things she won't let herself talk about because she devotes her attention and efforts to helping him through his problems, is having the forces that she can no longer contain express themselves in anger."

"We've noticed."

Siobhan's sure there have been reports. "There's a deep, searing rage boiling up in her. Jethro's noticed it, Timmy has, everyone has but she can't break through the barriers that will enable her to talk about it. She talks to me, she talks to Dr. Gyves, but she doesn't talk to James."

"It's so sad when a couple falls apart. But what can we do?"

"You and I? Little. _They_ must come together. They're not even a true couple, not anymore; they're two people who _do _love each other who are trying to hold a union together when it wants to fly apart. It's like holding an exploding bomb together with their bare hands, and the shrapnel's slipping between their fingers and wounding them both.

"I consider this month together without any distractions to be their best chance to strengthen their union, because if they go on here as they have, I don't believe they'll last more than another few months, and that shrapnel will cut deep into each of them."

"Do you believe they'll break up?" Shepherd asks, her tone carrying her regret. They were such a loving couple.

"A few months ago, at the Lincoln Memorial, I asked 'Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?'"

"'We will', we all said. All right. I'll order the vacation – and hope we're not too late."

x

Jennifer leans forward, fixing Siobhan with a close stare. "This is going to be one of those circumstances where you're more concerned about my people than NCIS' needs or regulations, is it?"

"Yes. Yes, it is."

"Are you _sure _you're not married to Gibbs?"

Siobhan shakes her head, unwilling to even picture the prospect. "He and I are too much alike. Neither of us likes it when rules interfere with what has to be done, but we take completely opposite stands. If we were to spend as much time together as Timmy and I do, one of us would be dead within a month."

"Amen to that. But I'm not convinced that I know which of you that would be."

"As you say, Director, amen to that."


End file.
